Consultant Pharmacy: An Important Role

Darshan Hey everyone, we have as you guys know, my podcast really deals with life sciences and pharmacy, and things that impact the engagement between the two, and things that impact just the care of patients. This specific podcast I thought was really interesting because I think groups like ascp come out and actually connect with a unique set of patients, patients who, whose needs are often not being met. So if you are in the pharmacy in this pharmacy, if you are a pharmacist or pharmacy, you want to be talking to someone like Chad, because you might want to find out Well, can I learn from lessons that that ascp has, if you're in the pharmaceutical industry, you may want to talk to Chad because these are pharmacists were frontline workers who are actually learning from patients and they need education. They need to know what your drugs are doing, what your devices are doing. So that's why I thought today's podcast makes sense. My name is Darshan Kulkarni, this is Darshan talks, and we have Chad Morris. So Chad, welcome. Chad Happy to be here. A little bit about yourself and escp. Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. Just from the audience perspective, I think the first time we met was a, a live stage podcasts. We were on stage in front of a group being recorded for a podcast and we had met I think, at lunch like 20 minutes before, and it's still one of the I had the best time. You know, obviously your personality lends to that. But just thanks for thanks for inviting me. Your show is fun. That's going to be a lot of fun today, you'll be good. Yeah. So um, yeah, to your point. asep is a is a unique organization. In pharmacy, we represent pharmacists, and pharmacies that take care of people in older adults setting. So traditionally, that's been skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities. Some states have intermediate care facilities, our pharmacists take care of a lot of individuals that live in group home setting, so developmentally disabled individual, so generally patients with complex medical needs. And it started, you know, 50 years ago, probably because a corner drugstore pharmacist said, How can I better serve these nursing homes that are popping up in the community? And ultimately, what what happened was the pharmacist figured out that there's a lot of things that those kinds of buildings need from efficiencies, like, how do you package medications and nurses can pass them better to how do you manage patients clinically when they start to accumulate medications. So the last 50 years has been this sort of growth and experience in how to take care of older adults that are complex from a medication standpoint. And now we sit at this intersection of sort of the Golden Age of pharmaceutical companies where we've got a lot of options to treat patients. So you've got a lot of demand for medications, and a lot of use of medications. Plus, you've got a population that over the age of 65 is growing faster than any other segment of our population. And even within that the over 85 population is growing the fastest within that over 65 population. So you've got older adults, they're living longer, they're healthier, primarily because of medications, but they're also dealing with the fact that they're they have to take a lot of those medications. So how do we do that safely? And how do we do that with an eye on the fact that they're a very different person than a younger, healthier population? So our pharmacists do that. You'll see them again, in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and in the community. A lot of them are being embedded in in physicians, clinics and doctor's offices that take care of generally older adults. So let's start with the basics. Because when I talk to pharmacists,