Cancer Pharmacy

Dr. Patti Thornewell

Current pharmacist with Exact Sciences make Colagadr for cancer screening

• Graduated from Uw-Madison in 2010

• Joined prepharmacy club

• Started to get interested in Highschool and realized it was an interesting thing to do

• Had no experience in pharmacy before being admitted into the school.

• From Wausau Wisconsin

• Wrote new letters for new drugs and it exposed her to actual career paths of pharmacy

• Internship at Dean clinics

• 4th year went back to a nontraditional approach

• Do whatever you can 4th year because it’s a 7-week try at a job and if you don’t like it you can leave at the end

• Took a rotation in Belize

• Worked with pharmacy benefit benefits manager

  • Experienced many roles in the pharmacy field

  • Looked into residencies

• Ended in Orgon For her residency program

  • Learned that pharmacists do many aspects

    • The contracting, what drugs are covered, best price for patients, developing different programs, applications, etc.

  • Creates better outcomes for patients health and money

• “ Played” traditional pharmacist in Wisconsin.

  • Lived above the pharmacy

  • She was there for 2 years so experienced many different programs including partnerships with nursing homes

  • Did compounding

• Got a job with Navitas there for 4 years managed care

  • Focused on growing the roles

  • Health market exchange

  • Did a little bit of everything

  • Smaller growing company

  • New projects and new developments

• Industry Pharmacy Stanify- made diabetes medicines

  • Lantis

  • MSL Medical science liaison talks to prescribers about the drugs they sell and educate

  • Health system and health plan individuals

    • Population health

    • Cost to the healthcare system and plans and patients

  • Work in health economics of outcomes

    • What is the budget income of the system

  • Headquarters team of medical affairs

    • Get information from teams to get out to field workers, prescribers, the public, etc.

    • Project management that develops a process to review grant requests

  • Now medical reviewer

    • Responsibility for reviewing every piece of material that comes out of the building with their product.

    • Needs a tracking number for auditing purposes

    • A very busy job with many people creating new content

    • A role that she thought a pharmacist would not be in

• Within manage care (AMCP) Within the school of pharmacy

• Industry (IPHO) Within the school of pharmacy

• Typical day

  • Emails

  • Review meetings

  • Calls to align with comments on pieces with Pfizer

  • Lots of team calls

  • Thursday knowledge exchange (what’s new)

    • Best way to learn

  • Fridays afternoons at 1 pm is flex Fridays and individuals can either catch up on work or with home things.

• Current project

  • Just got funding with Stand Up to Cancer to raise awareness for screening for Colon cancer

  • Need to have these conversations earlier

  • Approve social media post

• Her traits to be successful in her line of work

  • task-oriented

  • Great communicator

  • Detail-oriented

  • Great presenter

  • Hard worker

  • Great listener

  • Fast learner