Allison Trawinski

Her Story

Allison Trawinski, Pharm.D., M.B.A. received her Pharm.D. from Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in 2009 and completed a PGY1 Community Based Residency at Strong Memorial Hospital in 2010. She received her Master's in Medical Management (13') and M.B.A (15') from the Simon School of Business. Dr. Trawinski began managing the specialty pharmacy at UR Medicine in 2011 and was promoted to Assistant Director of Pharmacy, Specialty Pharmacy in 2019.

Facility

UR Medicine- Strong Memorial Hospital is an academic medical center and integrated delivery network located in Rochester, NY.

Recent Significant Projects

I started a PGY2 Specialty Pharmacy Administration and Leadership residency in July 2020. It's been a great experience to train a resident and have additional help and perspective on the projects we're working on. The resident gains experience interacting with all levels of leadership from pharmacy managers to hospital leadership. We're working on identifying ways to offer our services to more patients of our health system. In July 2020 we changed our dispensing system to one that was integrated into our electronic medical record. The conversion helped eliminate some of the duplication of documenting. We hope to add a specialty module onto our system to be able to improve our collection of metrics. We are in the process of hiring two pharmacy managers to focus on market access, and accreditation and quality. We hope that these roles help us increase our opportunity to take care of more of our own patients.

Initial Involvement in ASHP

I'm a member of the ASHP Section of Specialty Pharmacy Practioners and serve on the Section Advisory Group on Outcomes and Value. This is my second year on the specialty pharmacy SAG. The first year I got the opportunity to present a pearl about Strategies for minimizing audit recoupment with other best practices and this year I recently recorded a podcast for ASHP about employee engagement during COVID-19. Both were great opportunities to collaborate with colleagues at other health system specialty pharmacies. The SAG offers opportunities to get involved in the organization.

Why did you become involved in ASHP?

 Initially I was involved with ASHP because I am a residency program director for a PGY1 community-based pharmacy residency. This was a great way to recruit candidates and feed the pipeline for great clinical pharmacists to our organization. I have been working in specialty pharmacy for 10 years now so I was very excited when they started a section specifically for specialty. Most recently I started a PGY2 Specialty Administration and Leadership residency at our organization. It has been a great learning experience and I used the ASHP HSPAL resource library for the articles to help meet goals and objectives. Access to these resources motivated me to assist with building the specialty pharmacy productivity metrics resources for our SAG. I hope that it will be a useful reasouce to other members.

Advice for Someone New to Specialty Area

Specialty pharmacy is a great area to practice because it's still relatively new and there are so many opportunities. Networking and building relationships are so important to your success. It is vital to find the experts of all the areas you'll be working in to catch up with everything there is to learn. ASHP is a great way to access those people. You'll find best practices and ideas for innovation through networking.

How would you explain the value of ASHP to a friend or colleague?

Being active with ASHP helps you stay up to date on all the issues going on in specialty pharmacy. It also gives us a platform to be able to collaborate. I also enjoy the Women's leadership distribution list. Sara White and members do a great job sharing helpful resources that I read on a daily basis to help with my own professional development. I use ASHP for most of my continuing education needs. I take advantage of having Headspace with my membership for guided meditation. We could probably all benefit from a little more mindfulness.

What is the value of ASHP for the profession?

ASHP gets feedback from all it's members and can advocate for health system pharmacy where it matters. They are currently working to stop payer mandated white bagging. It's also the go-to for all things pharmacy residency. This helps advance our profession by contributing to training clinical pharmacists. The initiatives for racial diversity, equity and inclusion will provide actionable recommendations for our organizations to improve. ASHP is where you can go for the most up to date information.