How to leverage clinical skills in non-traditional careers

Since my time as a pharmacy student, there’s been growing interest within the profession in non-traditional careers. Students are learning more about business and technology and practitioners are venturing into new spaces like artificial intelligence and digital health. Pharmacists have a unique skill set to offer in non-traditional settings. But to get the most out of their expertise, pharmacists working in these organizations need to guide their employers on ways to leverage their clinical background. Educating stakeholdersFirst, it’s important to help stakeholders in your organization understand what you know and what you can do. Have one-on-one conversations with colleagues to introduce yourself and learn about their career journey and their role in the organization. This is standard for onboarding. For pharmacists, emphasize key areas of your clinician experience that you think would be most relevant. Sometimes, in these one-on-ones, your more tenured colleagues will think of creative ways that your clinical expertise can be helpful. This was how I first identified a use case for my clinical skill set at ODAIA. ODAIA is a Toronto-based health technology company that focuses on implementing artificial intelligence tools for the pharmaceutical industry. I discovered, in meetings with my colleagues, that therapeutic knowledge was a key gap with the commercial team.To better engage with our pharmaceutical partners, we needed to understand where their medications were positioned in the line of therapy. How its clinical efficacy and safety compared to other therapeutic alternatives. Which practitioners are important to the use of this medication? Taking a deeper dive into the therapeutic landscape allowed us to have better, more productive conversations within and outside of our organization. Most of my colleagues came from the technology or pharmaceutical industry. Learning the language of pharmacy was immensely helpful to the business and is now standard practice at ODAIA before any engagements with existing or potential pharmaceutical partners. In recognition of its impact, this work—which started with a one-on-one meeting—led to the creation of a medical affairs program at ODAIA.Read: Finding your niche: Going to the pharma sideSponsor new initiativesWhen it comes to growing ideas, it’s important to think big. When I realized that there may be an opportunity to expand the therapeutic work done for ODAIA, I sought cross-functional support from my leaders. As a result of this push, my employer approved my proposal to partner with the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy to take pharmacy students on their fourth-year non-direct patient care rotations. I believed that pharmacy students would benefit from exposure to artificial intelligence, data analytics, and the startup ecosystem. At the same time, ODAIA would be able to learn valuable therapeutic knowledge from medical education sessions led by students. Our pharmacy students would also advance ideas of their own, such as inviting practicing clinicians or pharmaceutical professionals to speak. The amount of engagement and questions from our team, especially from our engineers or product professionals, was very validating. This year, we also hired two new pharmacists to our team. How did we get from the relatively new concept of pharmacists having a unique skill set, to creating a full team of pharmacists? Creative thinking, initiative and consistency of delivery. Each time we executed a new pharmacy-related idea, we saw value and so did our leaders. Embracing the clinician identitySometimes we feel the need to shy away from our clinician identity when working in non-clinical settings. The desire to try to fit in with others is a common human instinct. But when we do so, we may miss out on unique opportunities. Here are a few considerations when it comes to how the pharmacist mindset can help in a non-traditional career. Pharmacists have:An understanding of the practitioners and the workflow of the healthcare systemA deep expertise of medicationsThe ability to speak the language of healthcareKnowledge of policies and regulatory frameworks relevant to the delivery of careExperience in working with a cross-functional teamThere are many more considerations than the above, but it’s a start. Another piece to keep in mind is that it’s important to help others embrace your identity and skill set. The more we articulate our capabilities externally, the easier it is for others outside of the profession to understand our value, which ultimately creates more opportunities for pharmacists. But to do so, we need to create increased visibility and advocacy for ourselves. ConclusionAs more pharmacists consider a non-traditional career, it’s important to ensure that our clinical skills, when appropriate, are put to use. By finding the right opportunities to flex our clinical muscle, we not only demonstrate our unique value, we also pave a path for future pharmacists to follow. Peter Zhang, PharmD, MBA is a hospital pharmacist at Southlake Regional Health Centre, a Senior Business Acceleration Partner at ODAIA, and a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy studying health entrepreneurship.

How to leverage clinical skills in non-traditional careers

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