Krist Azizian, PharmD, wants to standardize 80 percent of pharmacy procedures across multiple ambulatory clinics and a cancer hospital, a 158-bed community hospital, a cancer center, a specialty surgery hospital and a 348-bed community hospital.
Each hospital has different needs and purposes, though, and a recently-acquired hospital is not yet on the health system's EHR platform.
In late June, Keck Medicine of USC promoted him from chief pharmacy officer of two hospitals — Keck Hospital of USC and USC Norris Cancer Hospital, both in Los Angeles — to chief pharmacy officer of the system, which includes four hospitals and more than 100 clinics.
A few days after his promotion, Keck Medicine finalized its acquisition of Methodist Hospital of Southern California, which is now named USC Arcadia Hospital.
"There is a huge learning curve for me just to understand the operations there and how things work," Dr. Azizian told Becker's.
His reach goal is a 90-10 ratio of standardization and variation in pharmacy practices across Keck Medicine.
"One thing, for example, that I think we'll standardize is around proactive diversion monitoring and controlled substance and opioid storage," he said, adding that sterile compounding will be reconfigured to USP's new standards, which become effective Nov. 1.
Dr. Azizian said pharmacy leaders easily become stuck in their work by not switching up their pharmacotherapy monitoring and clinical intervention tools: "The more innovative pharmacy leadership teams I've seen have morphed their clinical pharmacy services to what the organization is shifting to," such as focusing on a patient's health outside a hospital's walls.