Talking Medication Safety in Specialty Pharmacy with ISMP | NASP Specialty Pharmacy Podcast

Sheila Arquette (0:05)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:10)

Welcome to The Pharmacy Podcast Network.

SPEAKER_3 (0:26)

You are listening to the NASP Specialty Pharmacy Podcast, a collaboration between the National Association of Specialty Pharmacy and The Pharmacy Podcast Network. Each episode dives deep into trends, challenges, innovations, and patient-centric practices shaping the future of this dynamic and rapidly evolving industry. Whether you're a pharmacist or healthcare provider, patient advocate or industry leader, you'll hear expert insights, real-world evidence, and thought-provoking discussion that highlights all that makes specialty pharmacy special.

SPEAKER_2 (1:00)

In support of NASP's mission to empower specialty pharmacy stakeholders to advance the standard of patient care, NASP supports a free market healthcare system in which all specialty pharmacies compete on the same fair and level playing field because that is in the best interest of the patients we collectively serve. NASP is committed to working with all stakeholders and policy makers to ensure that all patients have access to the life-saving medications they need and the high-touch patient care and support services they deserve from the pharmacy of their choosing.

Sheila Arquette (1:30)

Hello, my name is Sheila Arquette, and I'm the president and CEO of the National Association of Specialty Pharmacy. I'm delighted to welcome my special guest, Dr. Rita Jew, to this episode of the NASP Podcast. Dr. Rita Jew is president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, or ISMP, where she leads national efforts to prevent medication errors. She brings more than 25 years of advancing medication safety and pharmacy operations, guiding hospitals through automation, sterile compounding, and clinical transformation. She has held various leadership possessions, including Director of Pharmacy at UCSF Health, Executive Director of Pharmacy and Clinical Nutrition Services at CHOC Children's, and Clinical Manager at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Her expertise spans medication safety, pharmacy operations, healthcare technology and automation, and pediatric pharmacy services.

A widely published author and sought after speaker, Dr. Jew has presented extensively on clinical pharmacy topics and held adjunct faculty appointments at multiple schools of pharmacy and nursing. She earned her PharmD from the University of California San Francisco, completed her residency at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, and holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

She is a board certified pediatric pharmacy specialist. Rita, thanks so much for joining me today.

Rita Jew (2:55)

Of course. It's my pleasure to join you here.

Sheila Arquette (2:59)

So, many of our listeners may have heard of ISMP but may not know much about the organization. Can you tell us who is IMP and what is its mission?

Rita Jew (3:08)

Of course. Yes. ISMP stands for the Institute for Safe Medication Practices. We are an independent nonprofit organization that is devoted entirely to medication safety. And then in 2020, we became part of ACRI, which is another nonprofit organization that is more focused on patient safety in general and device safety.

Our mission is very simple but powerful. It is advancing patient safety worldwide by empowering the healthcare community to prevent medication errors. We are founded and rooted in medication error reporting. For more than 30 years, ISMP, through our medication error reporting program, has identified medication use risk and then we analyze a lot of these errors that came into our reporting portal and then helped develop practical strategies to help prevent patient harm.

So really collecting and analyzing the medication error report is just one big thing that we do but we then publish these kind of learnings in our newsletter. We also share these information through educational programs with health care professionals. And most importantly, what we do is we collaborate with our stakeholders, whether it's health care organizations or pharmaceutical industry, or even the government agencies or accreditation agency to help them implement safe medication use practices. And so throughout the work that we do, we are all about advocating for safer medication use systems. And then our biggest thing is that we are unique in the sense that we focus on understanding why errors happened, and then offering practical solutions to help organizations redesigning the systems to make things safer. And then in the last five years, we really have placed more focus on the ambulatory care settings, including community and specialty pharmacies, just because as we all know, more and more care is moving to the ambulatory settings.

Sheila Arquette (5:33)

Yeah, I remember when I was practicing a long, long time ago, I remember a couple of campaigns that came out of analyzing medication errors, like the lookalike soundalike, right? The ways to try to make sure you're dispensing the right medication. And this is before e-prescribing, but then writing out some of the common abbreviations, right? Like units and milligram and things like that, so that there weren't errors made like that.