Leveraging Collective Expertise, Wisdom, and Guidance Through Mastermind Teams.

Leadership positions with enormous responsibilities are challenging; at times leaders may feel isolated or lonely. A mastermind team is a small group of peer mentors or a personal board of directors, who meet on a recurring basis to share ideas for feedback, groupsource solutions, and to celebrate/commiserate on events. Joining a mastermind team helps leaders receive psychological support, encouragement, inspiration, suggestions for solving problems, and resources to manage challenges.

Organizational values: Essential substrate for professional identity formation.

Core organizational values are essential for any organization, including academic institutions. Formal and informal leaders can have a positive, or negative, impact on shaping their culture through the core values. Members of an organization, including students, can be shaped by the organizational values in ways that strengthen, or impede, their professional identity formation.

Quantifying the economic burden of unintended pregnancies due to drug-drug interactions with hormonal contraceptives from the United States payer perspective.

In the United States of America (USA), nearly 10 million women use oral contraceptives (OCs). Concomitant administration of certain medications can result in contraceptive failure, and consequently unintended pregnancies due to drug-drug interactions (DDIs). The objective of this analysis was to estimate the economic impact of unintended pregnancies due to DDIs among women of reproductive age using an OC alone or in combination with an enzyme inducer co-medication in the USA from a payer perspective.

Defining and enhancing collaboration between community pharmacists and primary care providers to improve medication safety.

Introduction: Over 4 billion prescriptions are dispensed each year to patients in the United States, with the number of prescriptions continuing to increase. There is a growing recognition of pharmacists' potential in improving medication safety in community settings, in collaboration with primary care providers (PCPs). However, the nature of collaboration has not been well defined, and barriers and strategies are not articulated.

An assessment of patient experiences as teachers of cultural sensitivity in an interprofessional setting.

Background And Purpose: The importance of cultural sensitivity training in pharmacy education is well-recognized, though best practices are not well described. Traditional teaching approaches such as faculty lectures may result in overgeneralization, lack of nuance, or tokenization. Utilizing patients from diverse special populations as teachers of cultural sensitivity may mitigate these risks.

Antiseizure medications and oral contraceptives: Impact of enzyme inducers on pregnancy outcomes and costs.

Purpose: To show the impact of drug-drug interactions (DDIs) associated with co-administration of enzyme-inducing (EI) antiseizure medications and oral contraceptives (OCs) on the annual number of unintended pregnancies, their outcomes, and their associated costs in the United States (US).

Methods: A Microsoft Excel pregnancy-outcomes model was developed to determine the impact of DDIs in women who take an OC as well as an EI antiseizure medication known to lower the effectiveness of the OC in preventing pregnancy. The model compared the number of unintended pregnancies, the expected pregnancy outcomes, and associated costs in women taking an OC and an EI medication with a matched cohort of women who took an OC and an enzyme-neutral (EN) antiseizure medication that is known not to interact with OCs.

Naloxone Prescribing and Education in Outpatient Pain Management and Palliative Care.

Over the past two decades, opioid use and overdose have increased substantially. Naloxone, an opioid overdose reversal agent, has been one of many risk mitigation strategies for preventing mortality due to overdose. Most literature describing naloxone utilization has been about populations of illicit drug users and patients in hospitals, primary care, and pharmacies.

Development of a pharmacoeconomic registry: an example using hormonal contraceptives.

Background: Disease-specific registries, documenting costs and probabilities from pharmacoeconomic studies along with health state utility values from quality-of-life studies could serve as a resource to guide researchers in evaluating the published literature and in the conduct of future economic evaluations for their own research. Registries cataloging economic evaluations currently exist, however they are restricted by the type of economic evaluations they include. There is a need for intervention-specific registries, that document all types of complete and partial economic evaluations and auxiliary information such as quality of life studies.

Pharmacy and Nursing Students' Perceptions Regarding the Role of Spirituality in Professional Education and Practice.

To compare first-year student pharmacists and nursing students with respect to their spirituality and perceptions of the role of spirituality in professional education and practice. This was a five-year, cross-sectional study. All first-year student pharmacists and nursing students were invited to participate in the survey during the first week of the fall semester in 2012 through 2016.

Incorporating Pharmacometrics into Pharmacoeconomic Models: Applications from Drug Development.

Pharmacometrics is the science of quantifying the relationship between the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of drugs in combination with disease models and trial information to aid in drug development and dosing optimization for clinical practice. Considering the variability in the dose-concentration-effect relationship of drugs, an opportunity exists in linking pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic model-based estimates with pharmacoeconomic models. This link may provide early estimates of the cost effectiveness of drug therapies, thus informing late-stage drug development, pricing, and reimbursement decisions.

Appropriateness of Term Limits for Administrative Appointments in Pharmacy Programs.

The appropriateness of term limits for administrative appointments is a subject of much discussion, not just within pharmacy programs, but in organizations of all types. The prospect of term limits for involves a wide variety of important organizational issues, including succession planning, institutional memory, strategic decision-making, and concepts regarding leadership styles overall. This paper examines both sides of the debate regarding the appropriateness of term limits for administrative appointments.

An Elective Course in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Health and Practice Issues.

To design, implement and assess a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) health and practice elective course for second- and third-year Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD) students. The course focused on health promotion, health care barriers, disease prevention, and treatment throughout an LGBT person's lifespan. The course included topic discussions, reading assignments, various active-learning activities, an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) with a transgender person, and guest speakers from the LGBT community.

Patients as Teachers of Cultural Sensitivity in Pharmacy Education.

Introduction: Cultural sensitivity training among pharmacy students is required by the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education, but little data exists on effective practices for teaching these concepts. The goal of this case study was to describe the process and determine if integration of a patient-led Cultural Sensitivity Panel into the required didactic curriculum impacts pharmacy student perceptions of their own cultural competence.

Description Of Case: A special population was defined based on the CAPE competencies requiring students demonstrate sensitivity and responsiveness to culture, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, spirituality, disability, and other aspects of diversity and identity.

Successful Remediation of an Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experience for an At-risk Student.

To describe a successful remediation for an Acute Care Medicine advanced pharmacy practice experience (APPE) in a student with multiple learning deficits. A literature review of pharmacy and medical experiential remediation was conducted to identify best practices to implement prior to designing the remediation for our student case. Based on this search and experience as preceptors, a three-phase remediation was designed: one week for assessment, two weeks for development of learning skills and strategies and six weeks for an on-campus APPE.

Establishing a Multidisciplinary Framework to Study Drug-Drug Interactions of Hormonal Contraceptives: An Invitation to Collaborate.

Hormonal contraceptive agents (HCAs) are widely used throughout the world, and women taking HCAs are likely to take other medications. However, little is known about the clinical effect of most drug-drug interactions (DDIs) associated with HCAs. A team of interdisciplinary outcomes and pharmacometric researchers from academia and industry jointly engage in a research project to (i) quantitatively elucidate DDI impacts on unintended pregnancies and breakthrough bleeding, and (ii) establish a DDI-prediction framework to inform optimal use of HCAs.

First-year Student Pharmacists' Spirituality and Perceptions Regarding the Role of Spirituality in Pharmacy Education.

To measure student pharmacists' spirituality utilizing validated survey instruments and to determine perceptions regarding the anticipated role of spirituality in academic course work and professional practice. This was a cross-sectional, descriptive study. The survey was offered to all first-year student pharmacists during the first week of the fall semester (2012-2015).

Hospital and Health Plan Partnerships: The Affordable Care Act's Impact on Promoting Health and Wellness.

Background: The Affordable Care Act (ACA) healthcare reforms, centered on achieving the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Triple Aim goals of improving patient care quality and satisfaction, improving population health, and reducing costs, have led to increasing partnerships between hospitals and insurance companies and the implementation of employee wellness programs. Hospitals and insurance companies have opted to partner to distribute the risk and resources and increase coordination of care.

Objective: To examine the ACA's impact on the health and wellness programs that have resulted from the joint ventures of hospitals and health plans based on the published literature.