Dr Sophia Humphreys Discusses Teamwork in Formulary Management

Sophia Humphreys, PharmD, MHA, BCBBS, director of system pharmacy formulary management and clinical programs at Sutter Health and clinical assistant professor, University of Washington School of Pharmacy, talked about how multiple departments can work together for formulary management.

Transcript

How important is teamwork in formulary management?

So I see formulary management as a whole team approach. There's an old saying, "It takes a village"; with formulary management, you can only rely on 1 particular group. For example, when we evaluate 1 subclass of medication treatment, if you wanted to work on a new treatment for Alzheimer's disease, you have to involve your local clinical experts and your physician frontline experts, who are actually treating these patients, who are actually monitoring these patients—you would love to have their input. And in the meantime, you want to have your formulary experts, usually, they are PharmDs, they would do clinical evaluations, they will do drug information study, they will evaluate the efficacy, safety, and tolerability of these treatments. Also, we need to work with our hospital CEOs and hospital CMOs (chief medical officers), [and] our hospital DOPs, which is the director of pharmacy, to work on operations of these particular treatments. Some treatments would require different baseline labs and monitoring. Some of them require ongoing monitoring, which involves lab, involves imaging. And after all of the clinical data are evaluated, we also wanted to work with our supply chain experts to secure contracting for our patients, for our system, as well as payers, and medication informatics, and as well as finance and legal teams.

So really within each IDN (integrated delivery network), formulary management really requires a systematic and integrated approach. And in the meantime, we also work with external partners such as professional associations, foundations to support our patients, and also our drug companies sometimes offer patient assistance, and sometimes offer information that we cannot obtain from [a] published channel. Those would help our pharmacists and our physicians to evaluate the needs for the patients and to have a more comprehensive approach when we manage a complicated disease state and when we make formulary decisions.