Listeners will learn about technician experiences and opportunities within the information and technology role. Three panelists from diverse backgrounds will discuss their career paths, advice for fellow technicians and where they envision additional opportunities for pharmacy technicians.
The information presented during the podcast reflects solely the opinions of the presenter. The information and materials are not, and are not intended as, a comprehensive source of drug information on this topic. The contents of the podcast have not been reviewed by ASHP, and should neither be interpreted as the official policies of ASHP, nor an endorsement of any product(s), nor should they be considered as a substitute for the professional judgment of the pharmacist or physician.
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Thanks for joining us in this episode of Informatics Bites, podcasts where we talk with our members about innovation and pharmacy, hot topics in informatics, and new technology. Brought to you by the ASHP section of pharmacy informatics and technology, these podcasts cover topics on innovation and pharmacy, hot topics in informatics, and new technology. My name is Scott Anderson, director of the ASHP section of pharmacy informatics and technology, and today we'll be having conversations with Shana LaPlant, a senior health services associate with McKesson RXO, Walter Hopgood, a pharmacy integration architect with East Alabama Health, and Shanda Smith, an advanced pharmacy systems compliance coordinator for outpatient pharmacies with UK healthcare, about technician opportunities for advancement in informatics. We will learn about three different pharmacy technicians and their career paths, advice for fellow technicians, and where they envision additional opportunities for pharmacy technicians within healthcare informatics. Thanks for joining us, and we can just jump right into it here. By the way of introduction, could you please tell us about your background and how you got into your current role, and specifically were there any types of trainings or certifications that helped develop your position, and Shana, why don't you take it away first? Thanks so much, Scott. I'm a pharmacy technician with solid experience in retail, long-term care, specialty, and hospital settings. I'm currently working in a non-traditional pharmacy roles, a senior patient assistant advocate, where I've found success in identifying financial hardships for patients through direct referrals and health system data imports. I leverage pharmaceutical manufacturer patient assistance programs, which provide free medication or financial assistance for high dollar out of pockets to reduce financial toxicity for patients. My vast experience in pharmacy has helped to prepare me. I found that to be extremely viable for my current role. Although there are no outside trainings or certifications that are required, I find that continuing to educate myself on changing healthcare landscape and continuing to hold my pharmacy license has been integral. Thanks Walter and Shana, you guys want to add anything to that? Sure, I can go next. I grew up in Alaska and worked at a hospital as a gopher until I was accidentally, I ran into the director of pharmacy who wanted to ask me if I wanted to be a pharmacy tech. This was back in the 80s, and techs weren't licensed back then, but I found a job that I loved, and I became kind of the computer system administrator, and then moved on to other jobs outside of Alaska working in healthcare IT. I eventually wound up at Cerner, which is now Oracle Health. I got my CPHT because I felt that was really important to continue learning and growing as I continued my career, and then after leaving Cerner, then becoming a consultant, I was put into a position where I backfilled someone who had left at East Alabama Medical Center, and it's kind of the accumulation of everything that I've learned over the years, doing different projects and different doing aspects of pharmacy that's really helped me. Shanda, would you like to share as well? Sure, so I've been working as an advanced pharmacy systems compliance coordinator for a little over two years. I have about 12 years total in pharmacy experience, with a little overnight of those being at UK healthcare. Since I've been with UK healthcare so long, I became really familiar with the pharmacy systems that we use every day and the workflows that we use as well, which helped me a lot in my current position. Before starting my role, I earned my CPHT ADV, and then I also took a lot of excel classes and PowerPoint classes and things like that just to prepare me for a role like this. But in the past two years, since I have started my current position, I've done multiple training sessions. I've earned a couple of professional certificates myself to better improve what I do, so I have a certificate in basic data analytics, and then another one in pharmacy informatics from ASHP. And then I also recently earned an end user badge for the Kabuto Data Model in Epic, which was really exciting. So nothing was necessarily required for my role, but it was always great to continue to educate myself. Thank you all for sharing that. And we'll progress right into the next question here. In these advanced roles that you each have, how do you demonstrate value to your organization? And specifically, how does your position do this? And is that value shared with external stakeholders via any types of metrics or KPIs? Walter, if you'd like to take it away first. I was trained in inpatient pharmacy, so I'm mostly an inpatient side. And while it's really different than retail pharmacy, the good thing about working in an inpatient pharmacy is that a lot of the processes are the same. So it doesn't really matter if you've got different spence cabinets or different robots or such. If you're able to understand the basics of how the inpatient pharmacy works, you're kind of able to use that and apply it wherever you go. So like when I was a consultant, they would drop me into a different hospital for different reasons. And I would easily be able to understand pharmacy aspect of it, but not just that I'd be able to, when we had to interact with other departments. So we're working on an EMAR project. So let's deal with nursing and figure out how nursing and pharmacy has to talk about this and how when you're working on a revenue project, how pharmacy is going to interact and deal with the revenue people. So being able to talk the inpatient talk, no matter where you're at, just really allows you to add value to the organization no matter where you're at. One of my jobs when I was a consultant was to mentor myself out of a job so that I could train people. So I was initially actually going to be a high school teacher when I was working in pharmacy towards a teaching degree and then realized, no, this is really, really what I want to do. So I kind of took that teaching background that I had gained through classes and used it in my consulting job. And even today still use it to be able to explain and document my way or the way of how things need to be done to show others how pharmacy works, the importance of bringing pharmacy in on projects, no matter if you think it's very tangential or if it's an integral part. So I think that my background has been able to help people understand the bigger picture just by knowing the integrated picture. I think that's a really great story to share there. Shanda, would you like to add anything? Sure. So my position is kind of the first of its kind at our institution regarding outpatient pharmacy. But I feel like my position adds value because it involves a combination of optimizing our operational efficiency, enhancing patient care and contributing to financial stability. For a team itself is rather small, it's just three of us at the moment, but we're constantly working hard to optimize our system and educate our staff on the pharmacy systems that we use every day to better enhance like employee satisfaction and patient care, reduce average turnaround times for patients, improve medication adherence rates, things like that. And then our specialty pharmacy specifically is accredited. So of course we have certain standards and metrics and things like that that we have to meet. So I feel like my role in part helps me some of those standard metrics, things like that. That's great. Shana, how about you? Yeah, absolutely. I would say being committed to our mission of improving health care in every setting is a huge added value. My position I believe brings added value to the organization by directly impacting patients lives and helping them gain access to medications they otherwise could not afford. Patients who cannot afford their medication costs are often at risk for abandoning treatment and not adhering to their treatment regimens. Through our efforts, we can help reduce these financial barriers and increase access and adherence. The value that is shared with external customers through various methods like KPIs, reports and metrics. Great. Thank you all for sharing those value stories. The next question is where do you think information technology is heading in pharmacy? And what types of technology are missing or underutilized in pharmacy, specifically in your practice or globally? Shanda, would you like to go first for this one? I think technology obviously is constantly growing and constantly changing. It's being more involved and intertwined with pharmacy and health care overall. I think in pharmacy, having so much technology is really making things a lot simpler and safer, more personalized for patients when you have errors that are popping up for over prescribed medications and things like that. I think we're seeing a shift more towards digital health platforms like telepharmacy, things like that, patient engagement tools like phone apps to help better adhere patient medication rates and things like that. So I think these advancements really aim to improve how patients receive care and manage their medications. As far as lacking, I'm not quite sure. I think every institution is a little bit different and they focus on certain areas of technology whenever it comes to health care. But I think overall, we have a pretty sturdy platform. System-wide. Thanks. Shana, do you want to add to that? Yeah, absolutely. I kind of agree with Shanda, though, that the pharmacy as far as technology is used in various degrees. I think the use of technology and the automation and the standardization, those kind of manual tasks going to automation really saves a lot of time for pharmacist life, allowing more time to engage in patient counseling, thus positively impacting patient care. Pharmacy is used technology in various degrees from computerized billing automation to inventory, things like that. Thanks, Walter. One of the things, and I tend to kind of get into the into the weeds sometimes when it comes to this kind of stuff. So I'm thinking, of course, we hear about AI going everywhere. And I think that as AI goes into the medical record more and more, that it can be used for things like alert fatigue. You could do things such as, you know, we just had a bit of a project where we implemented Beers Criteria to not give ex-medications to patients over a certain age because of these risks. And I think that if you were able to use AI in conjunction with these clinical alerts, that it could help actually drive better patient care. For example, you're not supposed to give benzos to elderly patients because of the risk of falls. Well, if you've got, you know, 365 year old patients, it's going to fire on every single one of those patients. But if you have one patient who's had a history of falls in the past, and two patients that don't, maybe it should only be firing on the patients that actually need that type of alert. So I think that's something that I think that with the use of AI and with the use of better technology that we would be able to do. And then you've got things like customizable drugs. I remember hearing a discussion about one hospital who actually did a bunch of testing genetic testing on their pediatric populations because like coding worked better in some patients and was contraindicated in others based on their genetics. So I think that if we could pull all this data together, that it would have a better patient experience, but also a better experience for providers and for pharmacy. Absolutely. And thank you all for sharing your thoughts on the future there. A lot of great things to come. How has your previous experience as a pharmacy technician contributed to your success in your role today? And Shana, if you'd like to go first. As a pharmacy technician with historical retail experience, I witnessed firsthand the financial hardships that patients encounter, which often led to gaps in therapy. With this knowledge, I leverage the available resources that many patients are unfamiliar with or have a challenging time navigating. This brings a positive impact to patients therapy with reduced financial toxicity. Thanks, Walter. Being a technician in informatics has been able to let me speak both sides, basically, and I can't explain it better than that other than saying I can sit and talk to a doctor about an amino glycoside allergy, but at the same time I can talk to a database administrator saying we need to restructure these things to make it work better in the EMR system. So I think that as a technician, you're able to see both sides of the clinical side as well as the technology side. Absolutely. And Shana? So as a pharmacy technician, I gained a lot of my experience in different parts of pharmacy work, obviously giving out medications, managing inventory, interacting with patients, things like that. But spending almost a decade with the same organization, it really helped me understand the pharmacy systems that we use every day. And I floated around to almost all of our pharmacies that we have at UK. So I became very familiar with the staff and the workflows and things like that. So I think having that overall experience really allowed me to effectively design and implement solutions that would help address real world problems that are faced by the pharmacy professionals at UK. Thanks. I'm always surprised how relevant experience is, even though when you're doing it, sometimes you think this will never be relevant again. But it sounds like the things you guys have done earlier in your career are really lending itself well to these advanced roles that you're in now. One final question for today, do you have any tips, advice, or insights you'd like to share with our ASHP colleagues? And Walter, if you want to take this one first, sure. Well, I will say that my biggest thing that I tell anyone is don't go into this field because your parents did or, you know, a friend did or something like that. Go into this field because it's your passion. You have to love what you do. And if you do, then that's going to make all the difference. I remember my very first oncology go live that I was working at was at the Children's Hospital. And I was working in the cancer clinic with the providers and this little 18 month old who was going through leukemia treatments. Tottled over to me and he wanted to be picked up and I was like, this is why I do this job so that he can get the help that he needs, but also that the providers get the help what they need without distractions to make the patient experience better. That's a fantastic story. Thanks for that. Shanda? Yeah, I think keeping yourself informed is really important. Pharmacy and technology are constantly changing. So obviously stay up to date with the latest news through like CE, professional journals, networking, things like that. Being flexible and adaptable not only is technology always changing, but health care itself is always changing. So be ready to change with that. Also being open to like new ideas and new ways of doing things just because a certain thing was done a certain way for as long as you can remember, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's the best way to go about doing those things, but always keep trying to improve yourself and improve your work and ask for feedback in areas where you feel like maybe you could grow or maybe you could learn more. I think those are always really important. I think those are really valuable insights. Shana, would you like to finish this off? Yeah, well, I think Shanda did a great job finishing that off. So I'll just kind of add to that. I would say echoing everything that she said and really just some continuing your education as health care and pharmacy continue to change there's new CEs that come out, new webinars that come out, new pharmacy technician advancements that come out. So I would just encourage anyone in this industry or in this field to continue to get those advancements as they're made available to us. That's a great thought for sure. Well, thank you for that. And thank you all. This is all the time we have today for our broadcast. So I would like to take one more moment to thank our guests, Shana, Walter, and Shanda for joining us today to discuss technician opportunities for advancement in informatics. Thanks for tuning in for this session of informatics fights. If you haven't before, I encourage you to check out all ASHP informatics resources. You can find member exclusive offerings in the informatics resource center, including articles, standards, and guidelines, as well as practice tools for pharmacy informatics and health care technology related topics. Be sure to follow the @ASHP official podcast for more episodes and informatics fights from the section of pharmacy informatics and technology. 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