News Continued from page 889
“Find a medical staff champion. That’s what we’ve had to do any time we want to initiate or expand services,” he advised. He said that several years ago, the medical staff supported pharmacists’ work in anticoagulation management so strongly that a decision was made to have pharmacy “own the complete process of initiating and monitoring anticoagulation therapy.” Under the previous system, he said, each anticoagulation visit resulted in patients seeing multiple health care providers and waiting for test results and decisions about changes to therapy. Now, he said, pharmacists do pointof-care testing, take a medication history, counsel the patient, and make any necessary changes to therapy. “It’s improved significantly since pharmacy has owned the process,” Folstad said. “We demonstrated more efficient and effective care, and patient satisfaction improved by having one person doing complete care rather than having a fragmented process.” Albracht said CPS practitioners at his VAMC work in primary care, acute care, long-term care, home-based primary care, mental health, infectious diseases, and pain management, and some have a limited scope of practice in hematology– oncology. Morreale said nearly 3000 of VA’s 7000 pharmacists have an advanced scope of practice that confers prescribing privileges in a variety of practice areas. But much of the recent advancedpractice action within VA is focused on pharmacists with a global scope of practice who support patient-centered care in primary care settings. “There’s a movement for pharmacists with a scope of practice to move from disease-based scopes of practice to actually have more practice area–based scopes,” Groppi said. She said CPS practitioners in primary care settings must demonstrate expertise and experience in the management of patients with a spectrum of diseases
commonly encountered in this care environment. “Even though the patient may have been referred to the pharmacist primarily for their diabetes management, the pharmacist is really reviewing all of the medications and the appropriateness of medications and really assessing other disease states, such as the patient’s blood pressure control or their lipid control,” Groppi said. Morreale said the number of CPS practitioners with an advanced scope of practice has more than doubled since 2010, when the VA began its implementation of the patient-centered medical home model of care. Dubbed the patientaligned care teams (PACT) initiative, this care model is being rolled out at all VHA facilities. PACT strongly supports the use of CPS practitioners, and the official PACT handbook includes specific staffing
recommendations for pharmacists on patient care teams. According to the handbook, the teams should include one CPS for every three “patient panels” to perform disease management and one anticoagulation CPS for every five patient panels to manage anticoagulation. Morreale said each panel consists of approximately 1200 patients. He said VA facilities, including community–based outpatient clinics that operate under contract, are hiring pharmacists to meet the standards specified in the handbook. And that bodes well for pharmacists and for patient care, he said. “Systemwide, I think we’re moving to a place where pharmacists really have the opportunity to use what they’ve learned. And that kind of was our goal,” Morreale said. —Kate Traynor DOI 10.2146/news140039
Iowa pharmacists fill allergy testing niche
F
or more than a decade, a pharmacistrun service at an Iowa hospital that tests patients for penicillin sensitivity has faced ups and downs, but the hospital has ultimately remained committed to the program. The service, at Iowa Methodist Medical Center, a 670-bed community-based teaching hospital in Des Moines, was described in the June 15, 2004, issue of AJHP. “We were looking for ways to, basically, improve the ability to use antimicrobials,” recalled Geoffrey C. Wall, internal medicine clinical pharmacist and lead author of the report. “As with most hospitals, I think, we realized that we were using a whole lot of alternative medications for patients with supposed penicillin allergies.”
According to the report, pharmacists evaluated 26 patients for penicillin allergy, and skin test results were negative in all but one of the 23 patients who met the criteria for testing. The test result was indeterminate for the remaining patient, and all 26 were subsequently treated with penicillin without incident. Wall said the idea for the allergy testing service was inspired by two events—his periodic occupational tuberculin skin test and a report published in 2000 in the journal Chest that described a penicillin allergy test pilot program administered by allergy fellows. “We don’t require a pulmonologist to read a [tuberculin test], so why do you have to be an allergist to do penicillin skin tests?” Wall recalled of his thinking at the time.
Am J Health-Syst Pharm—Vol 71 Jun 1, 2014
893
News
Iowa state law allows pharmacists to engage in collaborative practice agreements with physicians, and the state doesn’t restrict the arrangements to specific settings or diseases. Wall said this allows Iowa pharmacists to work “outside what I think would normally be considered the scope of practice, as long as there’s a protocol that is overseen by physicians” and approved by the hospital. He said the physician head of allergy at Iowa Methodist “used to be a pharmacist” and initially taught staff pharmacists how to perform and interpret the skin tests. The service was made available to infectious diseases (ID) physicians, who raved about it and even promoted the pharmacists’ work at national meetings.
Appointments ASHP appointed the following members to the Pharmacy Quality Alliance’s workgroups: Victor Cohen, Pharm.D., BCPS, CGP; Bethany DiPaula, Pharm.D., BCPP; J. Ashley Gunter, Pharm.D., BCPS; Cherry Jackson, Pharm.D., BCPP, FASHP; Eric Kutscher, Pharm.D., BCPP, FASHP; Shekhar Mehta, Pharm.D., M.S.; William Smith, Pharm.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., FASHP; Kathleen Vest, Pharm.D, CDE, BCACP; and Dennis Williams, Pharm.D., BCPS, FASHP, FCCP, FAPhA. Cohen, associate professor at Long Island University in Brooklyn, serves on the Medication Use Safety workgroup. DiPaula, associate professor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, serves as the secondary appointment to the Mental Health workgroup. Gunter, clinical pharmacist at Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center in Fort Hood, Texas, serves on the Adherence workgroup. Jackson, professor at Auburn University in Alabama, serves on the Mental Health workgroup. Kutscher, assistant director of pharmacy services at the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson, serves on the Medication Management for Integrated Care Teams workgroup. Mehta, director of clinical guidelines and quality improvement at ASHP, serves on the Measure Update workgroup. Smith, publisher at Executive Pharmacy Reviews in Richmond, Virginia, serves on the MTM–Part D workgroup. Vest, associate professor at Midwestern University in Downers Grove, Illinois, serves as the secondary appointment to the Medication Use Safety workgroup. Williams, associate professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, serves on the Long-Term Care workgroup.
894
Despite its positive start, the service soon became a victim of unforeseen events. The testing protocol required the use of Pre-Pen, the only product on the U.S. market for performing skin tests for penicillin sensitization. But manufacturing woes led to diminished availability of the product starting around 2001, followed by the withdrawal of Pre-Pen in 2004. “In the world of allergy it was a really big deal, because you couldn’t do penicillin allergy skin tests anymore,” Wall said. “So we had to put the service on hold.” A different manufacturer received FDA approval to market Pre-Pen in late 2009, allowing the hospital to restart the pharmacy-managed service around 2010. Wall estimated that the service has conducted 30–40 skin tests since then, and just one patient has had a positive test result. “We’d love to go gangbusters on it, but we simply don’t have the pharmacy staff to pull it off,” Wall said. He said that over the years, he has twice been “the last person standing who was still working and knew how to do the testing.” The pharmacy staff is currently regrouping with the support of a clinical coordinator who is very supportive of the program. “We’ve really taken baby steps this time around, simply because it is somewhat time-consuming. It really will take about 45 minutes to an hour of a pharmacist’s time to do it, at least in the configuration that we have set up,” Wall said in April. “My hope is that over the course of the next six months we’ll have a cadre of pharmacists trained, so it’s not all on one pharmacist’s shoulders.” Wall said that the skin test, if warranted on the basis of the pharmacist’s assessment of the patient, is performed in accordance with the manufacturer’s instructions and guidance from the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. The results are then communicated to the ID physician. “If they are going to go to a penicillin, we usually do a graded challenge on
Am J Health-Syst Pharm—Vol 71 Jun 1, 2014
them, just for an extra level of safety,” Wall said. The graded challenge consists of gradually increasing the dose of penicillin, administered orally, to largely rule out the risk that the patient will suffer a serious allergic reaction during therapy. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just 10% of patients who report a severe allergy to penicillin remain allergic throughout their lives. When properly performed, skin testing identifies up to 97% of patients who are allergic to penicillins. “You can feel pretty comfortable that if the test’s negative . . . you can give this patient a penicillin with the same fears that you would give it to somebody that doesn’t say that they’re allergic,” Wall said. “That’s what we actually say in our notes—that the patient should be able to tolerate penicillin as well as the general population that does not claim a penicillin allergy.” He said that patients who say they are allergic to penicillin are often unable to describe their past response to the drug. They often tell the pharmacist that their parents told them decades ago that they were allergic and should never take the drug. And even patients who can describe an allergic response they had during adulthood have tested negative and been successfully treated with a penicillin. Wall said the service provided at his hospital is more than a simple penicillin skin test program. “We really like to call it an allergy assessment or a drug allergy assessment program,” he said. “We actually do a lot of talking with the patients to see how much we can find out about [their] drug allergies.” A report in the March 2014 Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology found an association between reported penicillin allergy and increased hospital use as well as a significant increase in the use of fluoroquinolones, clindamycin, and vancomycin. The patients who were labeled penicillin-allergic also had higher rates of serious infection, including infections Continued on page 896
News Continued from page 894
associated with antimicrobial use, than patients who did not report a penicillin allergy. Wall said he is unsurprised by the findings of that study. “When you’re using alternative drugs to b-lactams, you often do have to select drugs that are more expensive, or drugs that have more adverse effects, or drugs that may not be the drugs of choice,” he said. He believes the program at Iowa Methodist benefits the hospital and its patients by supporting the wider use of penicillins and limiting the use of alternative antimicrobials. Wall has helped to trained pharmacists at other area hospitals how to perform skin tests, but he doesn’t know if any of these institutions went on to implement a program like the one at his hospital. In some cases, he said, a state’s pharmacy practice act may prevent pharmacists from administering the tests. But if state law doesn’t stand in the way, and good institutional support and training are available, pharmacists may be able to replicate the Iowa Methodist program at their own hospitals. “I think it’s worth it,” Wall said. “I think this is an area that’s definitely in pharmacy’s wheelhouse.” —Kate Traynor DOI 10.2146/news140040
896
News Briefs
• Marilyn K. Speedie, Ph.D., dean of the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy in Duluth and Minneapolis, received the 2014 Remington Honor Medal at the American Pharmacists Association (APhA) annual meeting in March. Other award recipients included Stuart J. Beatty, Pharm.D., BCACP, CDE, Academy of Pharmacy Practice and Management (APPM) Distinguished Achievement Award in Pharmacy Practice; Marialice Bennett, FAPhA, Linwood F. Tice Friend of APhA–Academy of Student Pharmacists (ASP) Award; Marie Chisholm-Burns, Pharm.D., M.P.H., M.B.A., FASHP, Academy of Pharmaceutical Research and Science Research (APRS) Achievement Award; Daniel Kudryashov, Good Government Student Pharmacist-of-the-Year Award; Cherokee Layson-Wolf, Pharm.D., CGP, BCACP, FAPhA, Community Pharmacy Residency Excellence in Precepting Award; Phillip Oppenheimer, Pharm.D., ASP Outstanding Dean Award; Brent N. Reed, Pharm.D., BCPS, Distinguished New Practitioner Award; Stephen W. Schondelmeyer, Pharm.D., M.P.A., Ph.D., FAPhA, APRS Tyler Prize for Stimulation of Research; Captain Pamela M. Schweitzer, Pharm.D., BCACP, Distinguished Federal Pharmacist Award; Timothy J. Stroup, FAPhA, FAHSP, APPM Pharmacy Management
Am J Health-Syst Pharm—Vol 71 Jun 1, 2014
Excellence Award; and Kristin Weitzel, Pharm.D., CDE, FAPhA, APPM Distinguished Achievement Award in Service.
ASHP Chief Executive Officer Paul W. Abramowitz, Pharm.D., Sc.D. (Hon), FASHP, attended the Annual Spring Meeting of the Vermont Society of HealthSystem Pharmacists (VtSHP) in Burlington on April 5. He gave the keynote presentation titled “Transforming Patient Care: Paramount Issues and Opportunities in Pharmacy Practice,” met with VtSHP’s Board, and installed VtSHP’s new officers. Dr. Abramowitz also toured the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences— Vermont Campus. On April 12–13, Dr. Abramowitz attended the Texas Society of Health-System Pharmacists (TSHP) Annual Seminar in Houston, where he gave the keynote presentation titled “Transforming Patient Care: Paramount Issues and Opportunities in Pharmacy Practice,” met with TSHP leadership, and presented the ASHP President’s Award.
Copyright of American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy is the property of American Society of Health System Pharmacists and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
“Find a medical staff champion. That’s what we’ve had to do any time we want to initiate or expand services,” he advised. He said that several years ago, the medical staff supported pharmacists’ work in anticoagulation management so strongly that a decision was made to have pharmacy “own the complete process of initiating and monitoring anticoagulation therapy.” Under the previous system, he said, each anticoagulation visit resulted in patients seeing multiple health care providers and waiting for test results and decisions about changes to therapy. Now, he said, pharmacists do pointof-care testing, take a medication history, counsel the patient, and make any necessary changes to therapy. “It’s improved significantly since pharmacy has owned the process,” Folstad said. “We demonstrated more efficient and effective care, and patient satisfaction improved by having one person doing complete care rather than having a fragmented process.” Albracht said CPS practitioners at his VAMC work in primary care, acute care, long-term care, home-based primary care, mental health, infectious diseases, and pain management, and some have a limited scope of practice in hematology– oncology. Morreale said nearly 3000 of VA’s 7000 pharmacists have an advanced scope of practice that confers prescribing privileges in a variety of practice areas. But much of the recent advancedpractice action within VA is focused on pharmacists with a global scope of practice who support patient-centered care in primary care settings. “There’s a movement for pharmacists with a scope of practice to move from disease-based scopes of practice to actually have more practice area–based scopes,” Groppi said. She said CPS practitioners in primary care settings must demonstrate expertise and experience in the management of patients with a spectrum of diseases
commonly encountered in this care environment. “Even though the patient may have been referred to the pharmacist primarily for their diabetes management, the pharmacist is really reviewing all of the medications and the appropriateness of medications and really assessing other disease states, such as the patient’s blood pressure control or their lipid control,” Groppi said. Morreale said the number of CPS practitioners with an advanced scope of practice has more than doubled since 2010, when the VA began its implementation of the patient-centered medical home model of care. Dubbed the patientaligned care teams (PACT) initiative, this care model is being rolled out at all VHA facilities. PACT strongly supports the use of CPS practitioners, and the official PACT handbook includes specific staffing
recommendations for pharmacists on patient care teams. According to the handbook, the teams should include one CPS for every three “patient panels” to perform disease management and one anticoagulation CPS for every five patient panels to manage anticoagulation. Morreale said each panel consists of approximately 1200 patients. He said VA facilities, including community–based outpatient clinics that operate under contract, are hiring pharmacists to meet the standards specified in the handbook. And that bodes well for pharmacists and for patient care, he said. “Systemwide, I think we’re moving to a place where pharmacists really have the opportunity to use what they’ve learned. And that kind of was our goal,” Morreale said. —Kate Traynor DOI 10.2146/news140039
Iowa pharmacists fill allergy testing niche
F
or more than a decade, a pharmacistrun service at an Iowa hospital that tests patients for penicillin sensitivity has faced ups and downs, but the hospital has ultimately remained committed to the program. The service, at Iowa Methodist Medical Center, a 670-bed community-based teaching hospital in Des Moines, was described in the June 15, 2004, issue of AJHP. “We were looking for ways to, basically, improve the ability to use antimicrobials,” recalled Geoffrey C. Wall, internal medicine clinical pharmacist and lead author of the report. “As with most hospitals, I think, we realized that we were using a whole lot of alternative medications for patients with supposed penicillin allergies.”
According to the report, pharmacists evaluated 26 patients for penicillin allergy, and skin test results were negative in all but one of the 23 patients who met the criteria for testing. The test result was indeterminate for the remaining patient, and all 26 were subsequently treated with penicillin without incident. Wall said the idea for the allergy testing service was inspired by two events—his periodic occupational tuberculin skin test and a report published in 2000 in the journal Chest that described a penicillin allergy test pilot program administered by allergy fellows. “We don’t require a pulmonologist to read a [tuberculin test], so why do you have to be an allergist to do penicillin skin tests?” Wall recalled of his thinking at the time.
Am J Health-Syst Pharm—Vol 71 Jun 1, 2014
893
News
Iowa state law allows pharmacists to engage in collaborative practice agreements with physicians, and the state doesn’t restrict the arrangements to specific settings or diseases. Wall said this allows Iowa pharmacists to work “outside what I think would normally be considered the scope of practice, as long as there’s a protocol that is overseen by physicians” and approved by the hospital. He said the physician head of allergy at Iowa Methodist “used to be a pharmacist” and initially taught staff pharmacists how to perform and interpret the skin tests. The service was made available to infectious diseases (ID) physicians, who raved about it and even promoted the pharmacists’ work at national meetings.
Appointments ASHP appointed the following members to the Pharmacy Quality Alliance’s workgroups: Victor Cohen, Pharm.D., BCPS, CGP; Bethany DiPaula, Pharm.D., BCPP; J. Ashley Gunter, Pharm.D., BCPS; Cherry Jackson, Pharm.D., BCPP, FASHP; Eric Kutscher, Pharm.D., BCPP, FASHP; Shekhar Mehta, Pharm.D., M.S.; William Smith, Pharm.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., FASHP; Kathleen Vest, Pharm.D, CDE, BCACP; and Dennis Williams, Pharm.D., BCPS, FASHP, FCCP, FAPhA. Cohen, associate professor at Long Island University in Brooklyn, serves on the Medication Use Safety workgroup. DiPaula, associate professor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, serves as the secondary appointment to the Mental Health workgroup. Gunter, clinical pharmacist at Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center in Fort Hood, Texas, serves on the Adherence workgroup. Jackson, professor at Auburn University in Alabama, serves on the Mental Health workgroup. Kutscher, assistant director of pharmacy services at the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson, serves on the Medication Management for Integrated Care Teams workgroup. Mehta, director of clinical guidelines and quality improvement at ASHP, serves on the Measure Update workgroup. Smith, publisher at Executive Pharmacy Reviews in Richmond, Virginia, serves on the MTM–Part D workgroup. Vest, associate professor at Midwestern University in Downers Grove, Illinois, serves as the secondary appointment to the Medication Use Safety workgroup. Williams, associate professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, serves on the Long-Term Care workgroup.
894
Despite its positive start, the service soon became a victim of unforeseen events. The testing protocol required the use of Pre-Pen, the only product on the U.S. market for performing skin tests for penicillin sensitization. But manufacturing woes led to diminished availability of the product starting around 2001, followed by the withdrawal of Pre-Pen in 2004. “In the world of allergy it was a really big deal, because you couldn’t do penicillin allergy skin tests anymore,” Wall said. “So we had to put the service on hold.” A different manufacturer received FDA approval to market Pre-Pen in late 2009, allowing the hospital to restart the pharmacy-managed service around 2010. Wall estimated that the service has conducted 30–40 skin tests since then, and just one patient has had a positive test result. “We’d love to go gangbusters on it, but we simply don’t have the pharmacy staff to pull it off,” Wall said. He said that over the years, he has twice been “the last person standing who was still working and knew how to do the testing.” The pharmacy staff is currently regrouping with the support of a clinical coordinator who is very supportive of the program. “We’ve really taken baby steps this time around, simply because it is somewhat time-consuming. It really will take about 45 minutes to an hour of a pharmacist’s time to do it, at least in the configuration that we have set up,” Wall said in April. “My hope is that over the course of the next six months we’ll have a cadre of pharmacists trained, so it’s not all on one pharmacist’s shoulders.” Wall said that the skin test, if warranted on the basis of the pharmacist’s assessment of the patient, is performed in accordance with the manufacturer’s instructions and guidance from the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. The results are then communicated to the ID physician. “If they are going to go to a penicillin, we usually do a graded challenge on
Am J Health-Syst Pharm—Vol 71 Jun 1, 2014
them, just for an extra level of safety,” Wall said. The graded challenge consists of gradually increasing the dose of penicillin, administered orally, to largely rule out the risk that the patient will suffer a serious allergic reaction during therapy. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just 10% of patients who report a severe allergy to penicillin remain allergic throughout their lives. When properly performed, skin testing identifies up to 97% of patients who are allergic to penicillins. “You can feel pretty comfortable that if the test’s negative . . . you can give this patient a penicillin with the same fears that you would give it to somebody that doesn’t say that they’re allergic,” Wall said. “That’s what we actually say in our notes—that the patient should be able to tolerate penicillin as well as the general population that does not claim a penicillin allergy.” He said that patients who say they are allergic to penicillin are often unable to describe their past response to the drug. They often tell the pharmacist that their parents told them decades ago that they were allergic and should never take the drug. And even patients who can describe an allergic response they had during adulthood have tested negative and been successfully treated with a penicillin. Wall said the service provided at his hospital is more than a simple penicillin skin test program. “We really like to call it an allergy assessment or a drug allergy assessment program,” he said. “We actually do a lot of talking with the patients to see how much we can find out about [their] drug allergies.” A report in the March 2014 Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology found an association between reported penicillin allergy and increased hospital use as well as a significant increase in the use of fluoroquinolones, clindamycin, and vancomycin. The patients who were labeled penicillin-allergic also had higher rates of serious infection, including infections Continued on page 896
News Continued from page 894
associated with antimicrobial use, than patients who did not report a penicillin allergy. Wall said he is unsurprised by the findings of that study. “When you’re using alternative drugs to b-lactams, you often do have to select drugs that are more expensive, or drugs that have more adverse effects, or drugs that may not be the drugs of choice,” he said. He believes the program at Iowa Methodist benefits the hospital and its patients by supporting the wider use of penicillins and limiting the use of alternative antimicrobials. Wall has helped to trained pharmacists at other area hospitals how to perform skin tests, but he doesn’t know if any of these institutions went on to implement a program like the one at his hospital. In some cases, he said, a state’s pharmacy practice act may prevent pharmacists from administering the tests. But if state law doesn’t stand in the way, and good institutional support and training are available, pharmacists may be able to replicate the Iowa Methodist program at their own hospitals. “I think it’s worth it,” Wall said. “I think this is an area that’s definitely in pharmacy’s wheelhouse.” —Kate Traynor DOI 10.2146/news140040
896
News Briefs
• Marilyn K. Speedie, Ph.D., dean of the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy in Duluth and Minneapolis, received the 2014 Remington Honor Medal at the American Pharmacists Association (APhA) annual meeting in March. Other award recipients included Stuart J. Beatty, Pharm.D., BCACP, CDE, Academy of Pharmacy Practice and Management (APPM) Distinguished Achievement Award in Pharmacy Practice; Marialice Bennett, FAPhA, Linwood F. Tice Friend of APhA–Academy of Student Pharmacists (ASP) Award; Marie Chisholm-Burns, Pharm.D., M.P.H., M.B.A., FASHP, Academy of Pharmaceutical Research and Science Research (APRS) Achievement Award; Daniel Kudryashov, Good Government Student Pharmacist-of-the-Year Award; Cherokee Layson-Wolf, Pharm.D., CGP, BCACP, FAPhA, Community Pharmacy Residency Excellence in Precepting Award; Phillip Oppenheimer, Pharm.D., ASP Outstanding Dean Award; Brent N. Reed, Pharm.D., BCPS, Distinguished New Practitioner Award; Stephen W. Schondelmeyer, Pharm.D., M.P.A., Ph.D., FAPhA, APRS Tyler Prize for Stimulation of Research; Captain Pamela M. Schweitzer, Pharm.D., BCACP, Distinguished Federal Pharmacist Award; Timothy J. Stroup, FAPhA, FAHSP, APPM Pharmacy Management
Am J Health-Syst Pharm—Vol 71 Jun 1, 2014
Excellence Award; and Kristin Weitzel, Pharm.D., CDE, FAPhA, APPM Distinguished Achievement Award in Service.
ASHP Chief Executive Officer Paul W. Abramowitz, Pharm.D., Sc.D. (Hon), FASHP, attended the Annual Spring Meeting of the Vermont Society of HealthSystem Pharmacists (VtSHP) in Burlington on April 5. He gave the keynote presentation titled “Transforming Patient Care: Paramount Issues and Opportunities in Pharmacy Practice,” met with VtSHP’s Board, and installed VtSHP’s new officers. Dr. Abramowitz also toured the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences— Vermont Campus. On April 12–13, Dr. Abramowitz attended the Texas Society of Health-System Pharmacists (TSHP) Annual Seminar in Houston, where he gave the keynote presentation titled “Transforming Patient Care: Paramount Issues and Opportunities in Pharmacy Practice,” met with TSHP leadership, and presented the ASHP President’s Award.
Copyright of American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy is the property of American Society of Health System Pharmacists and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
