Casey Olsen, PharmD ([email protected]) is a pharmacy informatics coordinator at Advocate Health, a 67-hospital system with inpatient, ambulatory, and retail pharmacy practice areas. Olsen received his PharmD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and completed an informatics PGY1/PGY2 residency.
As pharmacy informatics coordinator, Olsen facilitates continuous improvement of technology and policies/practices, with a recent focus on standardizing medication database management and optimizing prescribing. Acting as project manager for interdisciplinary teams of health professionals, pharmacists, analysts, and residents, Olsen prioritizes and tracks system projects emphasizing safety and transparency while managing team workload and project direction. He coordinates resolutions for system safety and regulatory escalations and aligns expectations across IT teams for ownership of tasks and responsibilities for interdisciplinary projects.
Olsen's involvement with ASHP includes serving as chair and vice chair of the Section of Pharmacy Informatics and Technology's Advisory Group on Clinical Decision Support and Analytics. Through partnership with ASHP members, he co-authored the ASHP Statement on Artificial Intelligence, collaborated on the creation of an Autoverification Toolkit, and produced various educational resources on novel technologies. Additionally, Olsen has presented on tools for successful electronic health record implementation and use, provided university lectures on healthcare communication and informatics, and served as a preceptor for residents and student learners.
Pharmacy and technology are inextricably linked. The pharmacy community has shown a hunger for growth and a willingness to embrace technology in order to improve patient safety, efficacy, and efficiency – redefining best practices and care paradigms while maintaining pharmacy’s role within safe medication use processes.
Pharmacy faces a challenge: the speed at which technology is advancing makes it difficult to keep up with the latest innovations and incorporate them into practice while still maintaining existing systems. This challenge is exacerbated by siloed decision making. Institutions are slow to resolve problems due to difficulty with information sharing or encounter barriers as the solutions require a prioritized approach from a unified voice larger than their single institution. I believe there is incredible opportunity within the ASHP community to improve identification of shared technologic hurdles, build collaborative structures with external organizations, and advocate for technology standardization and database interoperability.
I am honored to have been nominated for the director-at-large position. With your guidance, I am excited to foster collaboration, to drive change, and to sit together and dream of what technology can support. Thank you for your consideration and for your continued dedication to improving care.