The Society’s leadership has been working actively to build an alliance of pharmacy and therapeutics experts, corporate and healthcare organization medical directors, employers and others to represent the official “voice” of the pharmacy and therapeutics community and to develop new educational opportunities and policy that reflect industry best practices. We invite your active participation in our growth.

To that end, The Pharmacy & Therapeutics Society continues to recruit new members from across all practice settings. We have restructured our Board of Trustees, updated our constitution and bylaws and established a committee structure that will meet your needs as a P&T committee leader or participant, or as someone from a corporate or business setting concerned with the delivery of high-quality, outcomes-oriented pharmaceutical care.

The healthcare system is now confronting major change. Healthcare institutions, organizations and managers of pharmacy benefits face new challenges in integrating new approaches to evidence with efforts to maintain high quality services and manage costs effectively. Healthcare providers and patients face a potentially dizzying array of new choices in coverage and cost, and need to ensure the best possible decisions by patients and their families.

New approaches to pharmaceutical care, biologics and “biosimilars”, vaccines, healthcare technology, specialty pharmacy and healthcare procedures are on the doorstep. Some familiar drug products will soon be losing patent protection. New generic forms can be expected to change the formulary landscape in some major drug categories. And with all these changes come increasing demands from employers and government for evidence of quality healthcare and improved health outcomes commensurate with continued growth in healthcare spending. Studies of “comparative effectiveness” and the impact of biomarkers on the personalization of health care are ahead of us. The Society can be expected to play a major role in this challenging environment, aiding in the improvement of evidence based benefit design, drug formulary development and implementation across all healthcare practice settings.

The Society is taking a major step with two program initiatives for 2008 launched recently at the annual conference:

    •    The P & T Academy is a therapeutic area/drug category specific program that helps formulary committees and their "generalists" (the non-subspecialist physicians and the non-physicians) better understand the structure, endpoints, and usefulness/limitations of randomized clinical trials and their relationship to the clinical success measures from "regular clinical practice" that ultimately need to guide formulary decisions. This program is designed for individual member use or as a tool that can be used by a formulary committee for member training or orientation.
    •    The P & T Perspective is a program for colleges of pharmacy to help pharmacy students understand how a formulary committee operates in both an institutional and managed care settings. It will help them become more effective as staff for formulary committees once they graduate, and provide them with a framework and a pathway for assuming leadership positions over time. This program is also disease/therapeutic area specific. Content development and overall implementation at colleges of pharmacy are being guided by a steering committee composed of deans of colleges of pharmacy and their directors of curriculum development. We are very pleased with some early guidance on how to make this program useful during various stages of pharmacy training, and even how to apply the program where appropriate in multidisciplinary courses for physicians, nurses and pharmacists at universities that offers such opportunities. Finally, we intend to include in each therapeutic area module a template for those colleges of pharmacy that want to create their own P & T committee competition among groups of students. This will help them better assimilate the program content and provide an opportunity for more junior students to begin to use the P & T process earlier in their training by watching competitions featuring fellow students.

We invite interested individuals and companies to contact us about participating in these two initiatives.

In order to accomplish our overall objectives, we need the active involvement and support of more than just the dedicated group of individuals who have been working with us in the past. Our annual conference faculty, drawn from leadership positions in diverse healthcare settings has set a tone of excellence in substance and leadership. I thank them for their ongoing efforts to support the work of the Society. But we do need more of you to step forward and identify issues of importance, help populate the committees and task forces that are structured to address these issues, and help us in developing the recommendations and reports that can be disseminated through our annual conference, journal, on our website, and as “Webinars”, our series of web-based sponsored conferences, and in our annual conference November 6-7, 2008 in Washington, DC.

We have also received support from a number of pharmaceutical companies and other healthcare organizations, both as sponsors of our 2007 annual conference and as corporate members for 2007-2008. Again, I wish to thank these forward-thinking supporters of the Society and encourage you all to consider the role that the Society plays in elevating issues of concern to you and your organizations to a national stage that will facilitate their resolution. Corporate memberships are available in varying amounts and with varying direct and indirect benefits. I urge you to consider such memberships where appropriate.

I am also asking each one of you who visit our website or read Managed Care Interface, the official publication of The Pharmacy & Therapeutics Society, to consider applying for a $100 individual membership in the Society. Individual membership conveys a number of benefits, including a complimentary, one-year subscription to Managed Care Interface, a discount on registration fees for our annual conference and other paid events and the opportunity to participate on the committees of the Society and access our board members both formally and informally.

As part of member exchange, we are all committed to helping our colleagues within the Society address the individual and organizational implications and ramifications of the types of issues we are addressing nationally as a Society. But most importantly, the Society is advancing state-of-the-art policies and processes to establish and manage P&T committees, improve review and evaluation of drugs and technologies, and help you perfect your own knowledge and expertise. I can think of no better way for you to enrich the policy deliberations and the internal discussions of your organizations than with input gained from your interaction with Society colleagues. The $100 membership fee carries with it significantly more in direct monetary benefits than the charge itself. The intangible benefits deriving from your involvement in addressing critical healthcare issues and in being able to access your colleagues on the Society will be of inestimable value both personally and professionally.

I urge you to complete and return the membership application located in the Membership section of our website [link to membership section and form]. I also urge you to consider a corporate membership as appropriate. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our Executive Director, Joe Eichenholz (JEichenholz@PandTSociety.org ) at 201.923.4534.

I look forward to all of you joining us in this most important endeavor.

For a complete description of The Pharmacy & Therapeutics Society 2007-2008 Board of Trustees, click here (PDF Document).