Andrea Reed, serves as Senior Director, Pharmacy Value and Outcomes, Novant Health.
Andrea will be serving on the panel "Controlling Pharmacy Costs and How to Say No (and Sometimes Yes) to New Drugs" at Becker's Hospital Review 12th Annual Meeting. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place in Chicago from April 25-28, 2022.
To learn more about the conference and Andrea's session, click here.
Question: What are your top priorities for 2022?
Andrea Reed: Our top pharmacy priorities for 2022 include focus on workforce and access. For our workforce focus, this includes how to better engage our teams after a couple of difficult years managing through COVID-19, ensuring we have the right team members in the right roles providing the right services for better value and outcomes for our patients. For access, this includes everything from patients being able to obtain any medications when and where they need them to having pharmacists as providers in the right settings of care.
Q: What technologies and innovations are you most excited about in healthcare right now?
AR: As automation increases in pharmacy, it continues to offer a way to free up pharmacist resources to better reach patients and improve outcomes. Over time, we have added a lot of technology in pharmacy spaces and there is opportunity to improve connectivity between these different solutions, such as improved inventory and drug shortage management and speeding up delivery of medications to patients. Additionally, I am very excited about artificial intelligence functionality coming to health care and improved connectivity with genetic testing to improve pharmacogenomic management by pharmacists.
Q: What will the lasting legacy of COVID-19 be on the healthcare system?
AR: As a pharmacist, I feel very proud to have served on a state vaccine advisory council to help launch the COVID-19 vaccine response in North Carolina and highlight and address concerns with health equity and social determinants of health. It was absolutely inspiring to see all the ways pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, pharmacy students and residents helped deliver on a worldwide vaccine response. Improved delivery of virtual services certainly was a large benefit of pivoting in pandemic response which will be a long-lasting method of care delivery. Partnerships, alignment and collaboration with other health systems, health departments, and government organizations as also been a benefit during COVID-19 to streamline care in the need of public health. Lastly, pivoting to a partial virtual work from home model for health systems was long overdue.