Desi Kotis, PharmD, the chief pharmacy executive at the University of California San Francisco Health, told Becker's hospital pharmacy teams should continue focusing on grassroots efforts to ensure patients know their pharmacists and pharmacy technicians.
Dr. Kotis is also the vice dean of clinical affairs at UCSF Health and a fellow at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. Here, she shares her thoughts on pharmacists expanding their scopes of practice and post-pandemic financial pressures.
Note: Responses were lightly edited for grammar and clarity.
Question: What trends are you noticing in the hospital pharmacy industry, and what do you think about them?
Dr. Desi Kotis: Health system (not just hospital) pharmacy is a business within a business. Trends include, one, a strategy to expand ambulatory pharmacy in the retail and specialty pharmacy space, and two, advocacy on regulatory, compliance and legislative concerns, especially in respect to 340B programs and drug shortages.
Q: What is one new issue or problem you're facing this year, and how are you responding?
DK: Financial pressures coming out of the pandemic. These include patient throughput on the acute care site and ambulatory care sites; length of stay and transfers to other sites of care; and patient volumes from a backlog during the pandemic. On the pharmacy enterprise side, we are supporting patient transitions from admission to discharge. Our pharmacists and pharmacy technicians are integral in transition of care and LOS efficiency. We are also looking at efficiencies of workflow and revenue generation.
Q: Is there anything missing from conversations about the future of hospital pharmacy work?
DK: [We] need to be ahead of the conversation. We need to be proactive versus reactive in our work. This includes site-of-care changes for our outpatient infusion administration patients, home infusions for patients, hospital at home for patients and expansion of our ambulatory/retail pharmacy for specialty self-administered medications.
Q: What do you think about some initiatives and bills looking to expand pharmacists' scopes of practice?
DK: Necessary and overdue.