During this podcast, we will be discussing strategies to gain approval of potential new positions to an existing department or the creation of new clinic or service that would include pharmacy support. These positions are typically approved by the C-Suite of an organization.
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.
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the ASHP official podcast. Your guide to issues related to medication use, public health, and the profession of pharmacy. - Thank you for joining us in this episode of Pharmacy Hot Topics where we sit down with our experts and discuss what is currently top of mind in the world of pharmacy. My name is Chelsea Keedy, and joining me for today's episode is Carrie Reed, Chief Clinical Officer from Option Care Health and Delilah Blanco, Pharmacotherapy Specialist from Tampa General Hospital to discuss successful strategies for engaging the C-suite. Welcome and thanks for joining us today. - Great to be here. - Yes, thank you for having us. - And for people who are not familiar with the C-suite, Carrie, could you please give us a quick introduction of your role and explain the C-suite and what their role is within an organization? - Sure, I'm the Senior Vice President, Quality and Clinical Services for Option Care Health, serving as the senior most leader of our quality, risk management, and clinical service oversight programs. The C-suite is typically used to describe an organization's executive leadership team and includes leaders with titles including chief, such as chief executive officer or chief financial officer. Sometimes I'm referred to as our chief of clinical services. - That's really helpful background. Thank you very much for that. And Carrie, as being part of the C-suite, what type of information do you prefer to be provided with when a department is requesting a new service or position? What is the best way that you feel is appropriate to present this type of information? - Great questions. In short, C-suite members typically wanna see data supporting the request, things like volume, current growth, growth of services, current staffing levels and productivity, current expenses. They wanna understand return on investment or projected benefit of a new service or position, backed by reliable projections, estimates, or other sources of data. I think the best way to present this is to first give your leader the heads up that you're contemplating how to address resource needs or planning to put some information in front of them around a new service offering so that they're not caught off guard. This then will help you to tee up further discussion. And again, it lets your leader know that you're focused on meeting the needs of the business and she or he will not be surprised when you bring it forward. Then I'd say once you gather up your data, set up time to discuss your request with those supporting materials. Depending on your leader, they might wanna see that supporting information advanced and do a bit of a pre-read, or they might just prefer to sit down and have that discussion with you. Either way, you're probably gonna wanna expect that you won't get an immediate decision. Usually senior leaders will wanna consider the information and what you've been putting in front of them. And they have to weigh their decision based on other things that is on their radar and that they're paying attention to across the business, such as other initiatives or other costs or constraints that are going on before they get back to you. - Great, thank you so much. And as a pharmacy leader, Delilah has presented to the C-suite. So from that perspective, Delilah, could you please provide an example of the type of information you've provided in those situations? - Of course. So in our presentations to the C-suite, we've included multitude of information, including definitions of key terms that may not be inherently known outside the scope of pharmacy practice. For one of our presentations, it was important to distinguish between medication histories and medication reconciliation. We also include a short background related to the service being proposed and the reasoning as to why we feel so strongly implementing the service and how we'll enhance patient care or safety. We also provide the current state of the service or maybe the pilot that we had completed. In any pertinent data we've collected to show the impact that we're making or maybe the number of patients we've been able to provide the service to with the current amount of resources. And we sometimes compare our current state to what's considered best practice. Additionally, we often like to include real patient cases or examples related to the service, which highlight the importance of the work where either trying to implement or increase the resources that we have to provide the service. And we also find this creates a lasting impression with the importance related to the importance of the services, essentially highlighting some of the benefits. From there, our format usually follows with the proposal of the resources that would be needed to carry out the recommended future state and achieve best practice. So we typically have presented this almost as a cascading options, which include the ideal state of providing the service to all the patients we'd like to target and we would foresee benefiting from the service and the resources needed to reach that number, including the total number of full-time employees needed and the total costs of each employee. We then would present subgroups. If this is applicable, if we could do maybe like a subgroup of more targeted patient population in which we could focus our efforts on first and the respected number of resources for that plan to then expand over a specific course of time to eventually reach all of the patients in an ideal state. And lastly, we like to include objective measures of success for the service we're proposing so that we may track our progress and be able to present back any data to leadership. They may be interested in to see how we've been progressing. - Thank you. That's certainly a helpful and insightful perspective. So going off of what Delilah was touching on for any new service or position, a financial portion must be considered. So in your opinion, Carrie, is it beneficial to provide the potential revenue for a new position or service that would save or generate as part of that request? And if so, what type of information should be presented? - Yes, definitely. If there's potential revenue generation and/or cost savings, maybe there's a little bit of both, you're always gonna wanna have that data handy to substantiate and support your position. Any kind of projections like that that you're putting together, you probably wanna run by finance and have them in your corner to support what you're putting forward. There's other sources such as productivity, maybe get some information backed by your human resources department that, again, will help support and substantiate those positions. There's less of other internal sources of data. So I would certainly say consider that depending on what you're putting forward. And what are those other cross-functional departments that can help support the position around either that new service offering or that new staffing model that you'd like to put forward? - Great, thank you. So Delilah, in your organization, have you provided financial information upfront? And if so, what are the different methods you have used to provide that information? - Yes, we have provided financial information upfront in our presentations. Areas of quality improvement services are hard to quantify in dollar amounts. And this has been a real challenge for us, especially in the beginning, starting a new service. However, performing assessments of how our service may be impacting outcomes, which the hospital really pays attention to such as readmissions has helped. We've referenced an estimated cost of readmission that had been presented by a quality group that our hospital utilizes. And in an attempt to kind of quantify those dollars saved from our transitions of care service, which was one of the services we had presented about to the C-suite. And I do believe this helped our case to tie it back to some of the hospital's goals, overarching goals for the organization. However, ultimately, the organization recognized this was not perfect. And the big draw to our service really was more about increasing the quality of care and medication safety. But I do think they appreciated how we could at least tie some of our work into their bigger overarching goals. We have also included the estimated cost of the resources utilizing our HR department, as was just mentioned by Kerry, to aid with providing the median either hourly or salary rate of the requested resource and the benefits associated with the full-time position to estimate the cost of our suggested services. I feel this transparency is really necessary as you'll likely be asked to estimate these costs anyways or whenever you're proposing the service. So it's helpful to you to go ahead and preemptively include it in your presentation. At least that's what we've felt. - Awesome, thank you so much. So once that service or position is approved, Kerry, do you feel it is important to follow up with the C-suite to present the long-term benefits of that position or service? And if so, in which manner should this be done? - It sure is, Chelsea. You'll definitely want to be sure to loop around with your leader and do a couple of things. First, you want to acknowledge that approval and their support. Then you're going to want to also highlight the results that you're expecting and how you as the leader kind of owning this project is going to track them. You're also going to want to share progress throughout the process so that they know that you're continuing to monitor this and drive the results that you promised you were going to deliver when you asked for either that new position or to launch the new service line. You could do this either in one-on-ones. Sometimes it's really effective to just drop an email. So I think as long as you're aware of that communication cadence that your leader likes, maybe it's in, again, those one-on-ones that you're having with them, I think that you're really going to want to make sure that not only you're closing the loop, but you're continuing to feed in and share around how things are going. So I'm curious, Delilah, if this is something that you have done in the past, and if so, could you please provide examples of how you've accomplished this? - Yes, this is something that we have done in the past. I do believe tracking your progress and impact is important so that you could continue to show the benefits of the service or position that you were able to successfully obtain and maybe even continue to expand if that's in the plans. Our team has taken the approach of identifying objective measures of success during the proposal process. So including that in that original presentation or proposal, and even as far back as the pilot phases, if that's something that you decide to do first, so that we can provide updates to either our direct leadership or to the C-suite if they wish. We have tried to ensure our measures of success are easily identifiable in our electronic medical record via reports, if that's possible, so that it does require less manual chart review, if possible, and can be done quickly and accurately. Our team also likes to keep a log of particular patient cases, which we feel we've made a very significant impact as a result of implementing the service, just to be able to bring this back to leadership if they were to inquire about specific patient cases that could really hit home with them. Our team has had to actually go back for follow-up to the C-suite from our first presentation. As Carrie mentioned, you don't always get a right-of-way yes answer or no. They may wanna know some more information. So we actually had to include additional measures of success and show our plans for expansion over a certain number of years, review those objective outcomes and how we would be tracking those for further expansion and kind of take that from our first presentation and go into the second round that we had. - Well, this has certainly been a great conversation. That's all the time we have for today. I want to thank Carrie Reed and Delilah Blanco for joining us today to discuss successful strategies for engaging the C-suite. If you haven't before, I encourage you all to check out ASHP's online resources. You can find memory exclusive offerings such as a preceptor toolkit, the research resource center and more. Thanks again for joining us for this episode of Hot Topics and Pharmacy. And if you did enjoy today's conversation, be sure to subscribe to the ASHP official podcast for more great content. - Thank you for listening to ASHP official, The Voice of Pharmacists Advancing Healthcare. Be sure to visit ashp.org/podcast to discover more great episodes, access show notes and download the episode transcript. If you loved the episode and want to hear more, be sure to subscribe, rate or leave a review. Join us next time on ASHP official. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
