In the weeks after COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic in March 2020, T.J. Griffin’s Louisville, KY, office more resembled that of a college student during finals week than one belonging to a top executive at one of the country’s largest pharmacy services companies.

As chief pharmacy officer, Griffin was  PharMerica’s point person at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, interpreting, collecting and disseminating policies at a frenetic pace rivaled only by the literal mountain of documents that needed to be posted on PharMerica’s website or distributed by overnight courier.

Within 90 days, Griffin had presented more than 50 webinars to long-term care clients across dozens of states. That Herculean effort has come to symbolize how medication management and COVID are now commonly discussed today in the same breath.

To Griffin and his consultant pharmacist peers nationwide, stewardship of COVID information is now a permanent part of their professional repertoire.

Rapidly, the entire knowledge base of medication management seems to have grown exponentially in size, fueled in large part by the data engines of thousands of servers across the government and various private sectors.

“With COVID-19, there has been a significant shift across long-term care facilities to increase implementation and use of electronic health record (EHR) systems that can easily capture and share data — including medications — electronically in real-time,” observed Amy Ostrem, vice president of skilled nursing solution strategy for MatrixCare, a prominent IT player in long-term care.

Griffin and his colleague, Stephen Creasy , recently have found themselves also acting as full-time mythbusters around all things COVID and COVID vaccine-related. 

“Almost overnight, the consultant pharmacists have become the primary point of clinical contact for all things COVID, simply because of the manner in which information is changing so quickly,” said Creasy, PharMerica’s director of Clinical Services. “Our biggest responsibility and challenge is keeping all of the information straight and communicating it clearly to our clients.”

From the October 2021 Issue of McKnight's Long-Term Care News