“What if we took pharmacy back to its DNA… back to its essence… and then we prescribed empowerment, innovation, creativity, teamwork and personalization?” –USF Health Website
Having pondered this question, which had been his guide and vision throughout his career, Dr. Kevin Sneed asked himself how technology could be used toward the next advancement of pharmacy related health care. As the Founding Dean of the University of South Florida College of Pharmacy (USF COP), Dr. Sneed was instrumental in hiring a team of pharmacists to join him in becoming catalysts for change in all levels of healthcare. Despite the wealth of knowledge his team at the USF COP had, he realized that they also required a review of many existing technologies, including those that improved collaboration with physicians, prevented drug interaction conflicts, reduced patient medication usage over time, and verified drug appropriateness through automated biometric data.
Dr. Sneed’s passion was, in part, influenced by preventable patient care failures that pharmacists were exposed to. He was familiar with scenarios where patients were exposed to unnecessary medical conditions and reliance on medication that could have been avoided with the involvement of pharmacists in a team based clinical decision-making platform. Dr. Sneed argued that it was too prevalent that pharmacists were only known as prescription fillers. With the right processes in place, pharmacists could play a vital role in reducing drug interactions, providing education to both patients and other healthcare professionals about medications, as well as assisting with monitoring the efficacy of medications prescribed to patients.
Dr. Sneed and the COP team were part of the USF Health group, which was comprised of over 20 specialty centers, in areas like preventative medicine, primary care, skin care and physical therapy (“USF Health Morsani Center,” n.d.). The USF Health group had achieved a patient care breakthrough when it decided to invest in Epic, a software that allowed for its many divisions to record critical patient medical data. Due to the establishment of Pharmacy Plus, dubbed the “Pharmacy of the Future,” Dr. Sneed indicated the time had come to modify Epic and/or expand USF Health COP into new technologies designed to address the issues of improved pharmacy centered patient care. Dr. Sneed knew he had to decide about how, could and should additional healthcare technology platforms be implemented within USF Health COP to further his guiding vision of improved health care.
Presidential Address National Academy of Neuropsychology Conference Boston 2017
