Is it worth adding pharmacy technicians to your primary care practice?

Medication management remains one of the most stubborn administrative bottlenecks. A study in the September 2025 issue of Annals of Family Medicine found that integrating pharmacy technicians into primary care teams dramatically reduced physician workload and burnout, all while improving patients’ access to medications.

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, and the San Francisco Department of Public Health studied 11 safety-net primary care clinics that added five full-time pharmacy technicians to their care teams. Over a one-year period, the technicians handled 43,782 medication-related tasks — that is refills, prior authorizations and problem-solving with pharmacies and insurers.

Physicians and nurses reported that their “pain point” rating for medication access work dropped from 8.3 to 3.6 on a 10-point scale after the technicians were brought on board. Nearly 60% said the technicians had a highly beneficial impact on their work experience, and 63% said patient access to medications improved.

Prior authorizations

Among the study’s most notable findings was how technicians helped relieve one of primary care’s most universally despised tasks: prior authorizations. In qualitative feedback, physicians described the change in almost cathartic terms.

• One physician said simply, “I no longer do prior authorizations.”
• Others noted that technicians anticipated and resolved issues before physicians even knew they existed.
  • “I’m spending minimal time on prior authorizations or can avoid them altogether,” said a nurse practitioner/physician assistant (NP/PA).
  • “I dreaded prior authorizations before. Now I find they are done even before I am aware they are needed,” said another NP/PA.

The technicians’ scope in this study included completing prior authorizations, managing refill requests, correcting pharmacy errors and communicating directly with insurers and pharmacies.

Their expertise, the researchers wrote, “brought efficiency and expertise to a process that too often consumes clinician time and delays patient care.”

Time is money (and well-being)

More than half of respondents estimated the technicians saved them at least five hours of work per month; those working full-time clinic schedules reported saving more than ten.

For practices struggling with burnout and high turnover rates, that time could be invaluable.

Although the study did not include a formal cost analysis, the authors noted that pharmacy technicians’ average pay nationwide is about one-sixth that of physicians and half that of registered nurses (RNs), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For practices that can delegate prior authorizations, medication troubleshooting and refill workflows, the investment may quickly pay for itself in regained productivity.

A system fix or a workaround?

Researchers also pointed out an uncomfortable truth: pharmacy technicians are, in some ways, a workaround for a broken system. The administrative burden they help relieve largely stems from structural inefficiencies — nonstandard formularies, complex payer requirements and pharmacy communication failures.

“While our study provides evidence to support deployment of pharmacy technicians on primary care teams, we acknowledge that this intervention is a solution to a system-produced problem,” the authors wrote.

In other words, technicians make the process bearable, but they don’t fix what’s broken.

The verdict is

For primary care practices deciding whether to hire a pharmacy technician, the evidence is clear: if your team is struggling with medication management, prior authorizations or refill backlogs, a technician could restore hours of lost time each week.

They’re not a cure for medicine’s chronic administrative ills — but for many physicians, they may be the most practical prescription available.