Research Projects Page

The obejctive of the poster is to describe PrEP medication adhernece and persistence in patients seens at a multidisciplinary PrEP clinic. Patients receiving PrEP in a multidisciplinary clinic with an integrated clinical pharmacist had high rates of adherence and persistene. Patients reported few side effects and reasons for discontinuation were appropriate.

This study evaluated patient-reported outcomes in neurology specialty disease states gathered via a monthly refill questionnaire. and corresponding pharmacist interventions. There was a high patient-reported adherence rate at 91%. Most pharmacist interventions focused on ensuring safe and effective medication use. Addressing recent healthcare utilization was the most common intervention.

This study assessed DMARD switching, cycling, adherence, and persistence at an outpatient rheumatology clinic with an integrated health-system specialty pharmacy.

Most institutions utilize a Pharmacy and Therapeutics (P&T) Committee to create a formulary for inpatient administered medications that promotes cost effective treatment options to reduce hospital related drug costs. Due to their high cost, most specialty therapies are omitted from inpatient formularies. We describe the non-formulary process developed at our institution to expedite and overcome challenges created by inpatient administered specialty medications.

Because of the growing focus on outcomes research within Vanderbilt Specialty Pharmacy (VSP) and the need for more student research opportunities, VSP developed a longitudinal student research training program. This report describes the development and outcomes of that program as of June 2021.

This report describes VSP's development of an ASHP-accredited community based residency program in the health-system specialty pharmacy setting.

The objective of this study was to assess the efficacy of abatacept, adalimumab, and etanercept in pediatric JIA patients through changes in the Physician’s Global Assessment (PGA). We found that the majority of patients saw an improvement in their PGA score. Adverse events were similar across all three biologics, and the most common reason for biologic discontinuation was lack of response to therapy.

This study demonstrated high medication adherence rates and low patient out-of-pocket costs for patients in an integrated clinic and specialty pharmacy. Adherence measured using mean proportion of days covered was 0.89 and 80% of patients were adherent (PDC≥0.80). Rates of financial assistance were high and low out-of-pocket costs were associated with higher adherence.

Rates of persistent viremia (PV), defined as a detectable hepatitis c (HCV) viral load after 4 weeks of direct-acting antiviral (DAA) therapy, were low (5.7%) in a real-world cohort of 983 patients. High sustained virologic response (SVR) rates were achieved both in patients with PV (92.9%) and those with rapid virologic response (RVR) (96.5%), without significant differences.

This report describes a health-system pharmacy department’s response to recovering from a natural disaster and preparing for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). By detailing our experience and efforts, we hope to help other institutions who are or will be in a similar crisis-response mode.