This week: the UK pharmacists' defence body says accountability stays with the professional, a pharmacist who cannot code launches a telehealth platform, and nine new names join the directory.
Top signal
The pharmacists' defence body puts the professional in the loop. The Pharmacists' Defence Association, the UK body that defends pharmacists when things go wrong, published a 15-part guidance series on AI in pharmacy practice on 24 August. It rests on a "Professional-in-the-Loop" approach: pharmacists retain active oversight, professional judgement and accountability for decisions influenced by AI, because, in the PDA's words, AI "may influence professional decisions, but it cannot take responsibility for them". The stated purpose is "not to promote or discourage the use of AI, but to support pharmacists in making informed, safe and professionally defensible decisions when AI is involved"; the parts run from how AI works and where it is used, through regulation, data, bias and product liability, to practical steps, when not to use AI, and AI in patient care and PMR systems. A member survey on where AI is already in use runs until 20 September. It follows the GPhC's April guidance on independent professional judgement and the Royal College of Pharmacy's 2025 policy; in the College's March survey, 63.8% of respondents had used AI at work and 74% had concerns about it. For the pharmacists who keep filling this shipping log, and for every other clinician who builds: the tool can carry the workload, not the responsibility. The PDA
Shipped this week
- Pharmacia: pharmacist and pharmacy owner Jose Francisco Vega-Vallejos (@joedmiso on X), who says he cannot write a single line of code, launched an Australian telehealth and online pharmacy platform built entirely with AI: book an AHPRA-registered doctor from A$35 by phone or video, get a repeat prescription as an e-script token, or have it dispensed and delivered. X
- MyHealthDiary: internal medicine physician and practice owner Dan Odu MD has a free patient-facing health diary live on the App Store: visit notes, medications, symptoms and daily vitals such as blood pressure, glucose and weight, kept ready for the next appointment. His own patients are using it, he told Mark Cuban on X. X
- ED Rush: emergency medicine PA James Napolitano (Run the Board, Issue 2) pushed version 2.1.0 of his second iOS game on 26 August: a free emergency-department simulator with over 130 cases in which you triage, order, intervene and run codes while new problems keep arriving. Every patient now shows how long they have been in the department, amber as the stay drags on, red when it has gone too far. App Store
- And in the workshop, cardiologist Stefano Martano (Odin Health, Italy) has built the prescription-refill flow for the EU: the patient requests a refill in the app, a deterministic check confirms the drug is on the active therapy list, the renewal is due and nothing is flagged, the package is prepared, and the doctor accepts or refuses with one click. X
Build safely
- Is your coding agent covered by a BAA?: HIPAA Vault walks through what Anthropic and OpenAI actually document: Claude Code is covered only on Claude Enterprise or the Developer Platform with Zero Data Retention active and a signed BAA; Codex only on a HIPAA-eligible ChatGPT tier or an API account with Modified Retention. Free, Pro, Max, Plus and Team plans are not covered, neither BAA extends to your own machine, and the third-party tools and MCP servers an agent calls sit outside both. Vendor-authored (they sell compliant hosting) and US law, so read it as such; the rule that travels is simple: no real patient data in the prompt box unless the paperwork is in place. HIPAA Vault
- The FDA says formal guidance is coming: a week after last issue's discussion paper, Rick Abramson, director of the FDA's Digital Health Center of Excellence, told STAT that "our goal is formal policy guidance" on generative AI devices: broad guidance on the topic, plus narrower specialty guidance on areas "of special interest or special complexity". The quote sits above STAT's paywall; the rest of the piece does not. Docket FDA-2026-N-7874 stays open until 19 October. STAT
Tools & guides
- hermes: consultant neurologist Mark Wardle's SNOMED CT terminology server, library and command-line tool (Clojure, open source since 2020, 236 stars) imports a full release in under five minutes with no Docker, Elasticsearch or database, speaks the full Expression Constraint Language, cross-maps to ICD-10 and Read codes, and ships a native MCP server with 29 tools so an AI assistant can query the ontology properly; fixes to ECL attribute resolution landed this week. Read it next to Marcus Baw's toolchain from Issue 1: two UK clinicians, two ways to make terminology usable. GitHub
- A starter toolkit for the tech-curious clinician: Eve Cunningham MD MBA, who spent the past year building proofs-of-concept and shipping features alongside engineers at Cadence, lists the no-code, freemium tools she would start with: bolt.new for turning a clinical workflow into a prototype an engineer can build from, ElevenLabs for voice agents, the freemium scribes from OpenEvidence and Doximity, Gamma for decks, custom GPTs, and OpenEvidence for decision support. Her two caveats are the ones that matter: none of these connect to the EHR ("the clinician is still the API"), and experimenting is not deploying. LinkedIn
Events
- Aug to Oct (India): Health-a-thon 2026, billed as India's first national health hackathon for doctors and technologists, runs through October; from the Koita Foundation. Koita Foundation
- 3 Oct (Antwerp): Care & Code Clinical Build Day: doctors, nurses, pharmacists and physiotherapists vibe-code a working AI care tool in one day. Disclosure: this is our own event. careandcode.be
- 19 Oct: applications for Cohort 11 of the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme open (until 20 November), and the FDA docket on generative AI devices closes. NHS CEP
- 20 Oct (Nashville): the AAFP's FMX AI Hackathon: four hours, no AI or coding experience required, come with a primary-care pain point and leave with a prototype concept; free for FMX attendees, capped at 100 places, cash prizes for the top three teams. AAFP
New in the directory
- Zoltan Dul, DMD PhD (Hungary): practising paediatric dentist behind react-advanced-odontogram, an interactive SVG dental and periodontal charting editor for React with HL7 FHIR R4 import and export, ICDAS scoring and eleven interface languages; MIT-licensed, v2.4.0 on npm this month, 56 stars and outside contributors joining. GitHub
- Drilon Maloku (Germany): the assistant dentist behind DentVault, the open-source clinic and patient management app from Issue 1 (Svelte, local-only data), and before that Cephalyzer, a cephalometric analysis app he describes as a Claude Code competition winner. GitHub
- Seven names you have already met are now verified entries: Anna Trabaud-Lopez (France, Bolus), Bruce Nadro DO (USA, MoodQuad), David Duque-Ropero MD (Colombia, BID Artifacts), James Napolitano PA-C (USA, Run the Board and ED Rush), Nikhil Shah (Canada, AudioScholar), Sang Hyun Joo (South Korea, the NEDIS analysis pipeline) and Vivek Raskar (India, Titria). cliniciansthatcode.com
- The directory now counts 45 clinician-builders with verified, evidence-graded ships, nine more than last week. Browse it, forward this to a colleague who ships, and reply if you know someone who belongs in it. cliniciansthatcode.com