MA0-103 information - McAfee Certified Product Specialist - DLPE Updated: 2023

All pharmacists provide some level of drug information, whether to other clinicians or to patients. In fact, a latest survey found that 96.4% of 491 hospitals have staff pharmacists who routinely answer drug information questions,^[1] and a separate survey of colleges of pharmacy showed that 89% of first professional pharmacy degree programs require at least one didactic course in drug information.^[2] While most pharmacists are equipped with knowledge regarding the practice of drug information, the ever-expanding list of pharmaceuticals, as well as the overwhelming amount of clinical data, makes it difficult for practitioners to stay current with latest developments. This also results in the need for more advanced problem-solving skills in order to answer the more complex questions that challenge practitioners today.

Training in Drug Information Practice

Drug information certified are pharmacists whose primary responsibility is the provision of drug information. As with any specialty, formalized training beyond that received in pharmacy school is not required; however, this focused training does Excellerate the practitioner's clinical credibility and ability to compete with others for employment opportunities. These two intangible attributes may also be obtained with time and experience.

The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) provides residency accreditation in drug information. There are currently 31 ASHP-accredited drug information specialty residencies located throughout the United States. These residency programs are housed in community, academic, and industrial settings and offer a variety of learning opportunities. Although there are additional drug information residency programs that are not ASHP accredited, the standards and objectives for such accreditation may be used to describe the clinical skills set of the drug information specialist which go beyond the minimum standards required of all pharmacists.^[3]

Most drug information residency programs provide the resident with 12 months of directed, postgraduate practical experience in the provision of comprehensive drug information. During this 12-month period, the resident is exposed to various aspects of drug information practice that range in scope and complexity, with the ultimate goal of training the resident to become a competent drug information specialist. Many of the competencies required of a drug information resident are specific to executive issues, such as the development and management of a drug information center, but there are many more competencies that construct the foundation of a drug information specialist's clinical practice. Drug information certified must be up-to-date with relevant drug-related literature in order to provide the most current information. They are often tasked as a pharmacy representative to pharmacy and therapeutics (P&T) committees. Responsibilities may include preparing medication-use policies and procedures, improving a health system's adverse-drug-reaction reporting and medication-use evaluation programs, and creating and distributing newsletters containing pertinent medication-use information. The drug information specialist must have advanced literature search and assessment skills to develop drug monographs. Additional responsibilities often include developing patient safety initiatives, ensuring compliance with Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations's standards, and appropriately utilizing drug-contracting opportunities to decrease drug expenditures. Drug information certified may also work in pharmacy informatics.

Career Opportunities in Drug Information

As previously mentioned, drug information certified work in a variety of settings, each with its own unique scope of practice. Academic drug information centers staffed by drug information certified offer pharmacy students practical experience in utilizing available medical media and developing literature-search strategies. Of 88 colleges of pharmacy surveyed, 20% require a drug information practice experience and 70% offer the experience as an elective.^[2] These centers are often located within colleges of pharmacy or university hospitals. Most offer their services to a limited range of health care professionals, such as those within certain facilities or within the region or state. Others offer their services to community pharmacists and patients. Many health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and group purchasing organizations (GPOs) have contractual relationships with academic drug information centers, which in turn offer their services to the respective members of the organizations. In addition, HMOs, GPOs, and pharmacy benefit management companies (PBMs) have internal drug information departments that assist their members on a grander scale by providing many of the items utilized by P&T committees in making medication-use decisions. Many PBMs also provide consumer-based drug information via the Internet that is prepared by drug information specialists.

Proprietary and generic drug manufacturers are staffed with pharmacists who provide drug information specifically for the drugs manufactured by the respective companies. Although there is some information they cannot legally share and all information received should be critically evaluated, they do maintain a database of clinical studies, both published and unpublished, that provides hard-to-find information. These drug information certified are available to health care professionals and the public and should be contacted if a patient has an unexpected adverse drug reaction. In addition, drug information certified have practical knowledge of clinical trial design and often provide valuable insight as medical writers and in governmental agencies analyzing drug efficacy and safety claims.

An Underutilized Resource

Drug information certified are trained to provide clear, concise, and accurate drug information in a variety of settings. Not only do they provide quality service, but pharmacist-provided drug information, adverse-drug-reaction monitoring, and formulary management have been associated with significant reductions in the total cost of care in hospital settings, as well as reductions in patient deaths.^[4] The presence of a drug information center providing these services in 232 hospitals reduced total cost of care per hospital by $5,226,128.22 (p = 0.003), including a $391,604.94 reduction in drug costs per hospital, and was associated with a total of 10,463 fewer deaths.^[4] Disappointingly, an online survey of health care professionals showed that only 1% of respondents contact a drug information center when the need arises.^[5] Another latest survey found that only 5.9% of 491 hospitals have a staff position dedicated to the provision of drug information and 4.1% have a formal drug information center.^[1] Granted, contacting a drug information specialist may not be the fastest way to obtain drug information in an emergency situation; nonetheless, this underutilization raises several questions.

Today, the Internet provides a plethora of information for both health care professionals and their patients. Many practitioners probably use the Internet when seeking answers to questions. However, at least one study judged significantly more responses obtained from a drug information center as accurate when compared with those received from a Usenet newsgroup (p = 0.001).^[6] Also, there is no quality control for these types of newsgroup services and other similar medical information sources housed on the Internet, and practitioners may be jeopardizing their own credibility when using these resources. Another source of information is facility-housed references, including print and electronic products. Electronic drug information products are becoming increasingly popular. A latest survey showed that 60.4% of 491 hospitals subscribed to some sort of electronic product.^[1] Two interesting surveys on drug information references have been conducted.^[7,8] In one survey, 40.9% of 22 respondents said they were not satisfied with the drug information resources to which their pharmacy currently subscribed.^[7] In another survey, 38% of 71 respondents said they used a drug information reference at least 10 times a day, and another 35.2% used such a reference 3-5 times daily.^[8] This discrepancy shows that practitioners regularly use some sort of drug information reference, even though they are not always satisfied with the information obtained.

With so many pharmacists retrieving information from drug information references, the underutilization of drug information certified as a resource cannot be attributed to a lack in the number of questions that need to be answered. Perhaps practitioners do not know how to find drug information specialists. Industry-based certified can be contacted via the manufacturer's Web site, and the Physicians' Desk Reference provides a listing of contact information for drug manufacturers.^[9] Drug Topics's Red Book contains a list of academic drug information centers, and many colleges of pharmacy provide these services to the pharmacies in their respective states.^[10] It is also worth contacting HMOs or GPOs, where applicable, to learn about the services they provide.

Drug information certified are a valuable resource available to support appropriate drug use and Excellerate quality of patient care. New practitioners are urged to take advantage of the expertise of drug information specialists, either within or outside of their own institutions.

We have a fantastic perm opportunity for an Information Security Lead in Pretoria. This is an on-site position where the successful persons will be responsible for developing and managing Information Systems cyber security, including disaster recovery, database protection and software development. Develop and deliver Information Security standards, best practices, architecture, and systems to ensure information system security.

Knowledge and experience:

• Strong technical background in systems and network security
• Project Management skills (ability to plan, organize, coordinate, and implement)
• Experience in compilation of management reports
• Understanding of, and practical experience of applying the Data Protection Act, the Freedom of Information Act and other related legislation, standards and codes of practice
• Knowledge of information security including ISO/IEC 27001 Information Security Management Standard

If you have the above knowledge and experience, kindly send through your updated CV and we will be in contact shortly.

Desired Skills:

Learn more/Apply for this position

Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, co-founder and co-director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, and the inaugural visiting fellow at the technology and society organisation at Google. He studies how technological progress changes the world.

Andrew McAfee has written for The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times and he has talked about his work on CNN and 60 Minutes, at the World Economic Forum and TED. He’s also advised many of the world’s largest corporations and organisations, including the International Monetary Fund.

‘Elon Musk is fascinating because, to my eyes, he’s super geeky in some ways and not in others’

His new book, The Geek Way, will be published by Pan Macmillan on 16 November.

Information Age sat down with Andrew McAfee to discuss how internet pioneers such as Reed Hastings of Netflix and Jeff Bezos at Amazon have turned the established way of doing things on its head, and what CTOs and heads of IT can learn when it comes to managing their own teams.

How would you define a geek?

For me, a geek is somebody with two qualities. First of all, they get obsessed with the hard problem, and they wrestle with it. They’re very tenacious. They can’t let it go. And second, if the solutions to that problem that they come up with are unconventional, that doesn’t bother them. They’re not constrained by mainstream opinion or the status quo. So, for me, a geek is an obsessive maverick.

What is the Geek Way? What are its characteristics?

I got obsessed with the geeks who dove in on the really hard problem of how do you run and grow a successful company in these very turbulent times? The Geek Way is my answer for how they accomplished that. The Geek Way is the set of philosophies and practises that they have for running a company. And the reason I wrote the book is that I think the Geek Way works better in today’s day and age than the playbook that we developed over the industrial era.

When you say industrial era, I suppose you mean a visionary leader, a pyramid or dirigiste structure?

Let me let me put it a little bit differently, because a lot of the people who are running geek companies are visionary. They want to put you on Mars, they want to accomplish the green transition, they want to increase the GDP of the internet. These are big goals.

Over the industrial era, we became fond of the judgement and the decision-making ability of people higher up on the org chart. We were really fond of process and communication coordination and a whole lot of structured interactions in the organisation going all across the company. We got really fond of planning. We became confident in our ability to plan out big efforts in advance and have long planning horizons. And then finally we just had this philosophy of winning all the time and that quickly turns into a philosophy of not ever admitting that you’ve been wrong. And that makes people and organisations inherently defensive as opposed to inherently open.

I compared the playbook that we built up over the industrial ear to what these leading disruptive companies were doing. There was a really big disconnect. And I thought the geeks had figured out something better.

Who for you personifies the Geek Way as a business leader? Somebody like Elon Musk, for example, may be running a groundbreaking tech company, but he seems to me entirely that kind of my-way-or-the-highway kind of thinking.

Elon is a really interesting case because he and his companies have done things that are absolutely squarely within the Geek Way. A fondness for iterating instead of planning is the clearest example. For me, both SpaceX and Tesla are deeply, deeply agile organisations. They believe that you learn and that you gain knowledge about what you want to accomplish by trying things. With as rapid accidence as possible. That’s extraordinarily geeky, and it’s very different to the old planning heavy approaches of the internet.

But to your point, as we learn more about his management style and especially what he’s doing at whatever we’re supposed to call Twitter now, it seems kind of impetuous. It seems very, very overconfident. And these are not core aspects of the Geek Way. So, Elon is fascinating because to my eyes, he’s super geeky in some ways and not in others.

Then who is a paragon of the Geek Way?

For me, Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, is a pretty good example. He was a complete outsider to the entertainment industry, and we should remember that Netflix got started as a DVD by mail rental service. There’s nothing there that screams disruption of Hollywood, which then was a really well entrenched industry in Southern California. But Netflix has pioneered the changes in how we want to be entertained and how we consume entertainment that have turned the industry on its head.

When you read about how he went about that, you realise that, to my definition, is very, very geeky. He doesn’t believe in a whole lot of cross-functional communication structure coordination. He believes in a really decentralised, very autonomous organisation and is willing to tolerate the redundancy and sometimes the chaos that brings. He learned to be less fond of his judgement over time because he made some big calls in the wrong direction, but more to the point, he worked really, really hard on building a corporate culture at Netflix which was able to correct him or that was able to make the right decision even when he got an important decision wrong.

In his book No Rules Rules, he tells a story about how he didn’t think it was a good use of Netflix’s resources to allow people to get content. A couple of people in his company thought that was wrong, so they went out and did research with users in three different countries, and they came back and said, hey, people love the get feature. And it’s not a one per cent use case, it’s at least a 15 per cent use case. And instead of ignoring that or brushing them off, Hastings and his colleagues admitted they were wrong. It’s that kind of basic approach to leadership that I think characterises the Geek Way.

Apart from Netflix’s nimble thinking, are there any other companies which you would say exemplify the Geek Way?

Amazon is a gigantic company that, to my eyes, still tries very hard to keep following the Geek Way, even though they’re huge company with extraordinarily large, complicated operations, they still believe in this ownership-based management style, an org structure and a style. They realise that to accomplish big things, you’re going to have to get some things wrong and so they hand out Just do it awards to people who wanted to go try to accomplish that was not part of their day job. That’s not stay within your lane. That’s go try to get things done.

And I was struck a while back in one of Jeff Bezos’s letters to his shareholders when he was still the CEO, when he said, I guarantee you we are incubating multibillion-dollar failures inside Amazon right now. That’s kind of an extraordinary thing for a CEO to say to his investors. And when we look at the money that they’ve spent on the Alexa programme so far, I think he was right. I think they were doing a multi-billion-dollar failure but that’s OK, that’s part of the culture.

I contrast that to the industrial era focus on winning at all costs, digging in your heels, and not ever being willing to admit that you were wrong.

Can you give me an example of a company that had industrial age thinking and then took on board what you are talking about, this nimble Geek Way thinking?

For me, what Satya Nadella has done since he took over at Microsoft is one of the great corporate turnarounds of all time. At least on a level with what Steve Jobs accomplished when he came back to Apple.

You’ve got to remember where Microsoft was at the time. It wasn’t leading anything in the technology space, there was no buzz there, and internally they had an extremely sclerotic bureaucracy. There was a ton of political infighting at all levels, and they absolutely had this inherently defensive culture, where you never ever heard an executive admit that they had been wrong about anything.

One of the brilliant things that I think Nadella did culturally was to say you cannot own code or data at Microsoft because it’s subject to privacy and security. But if you want to grab some code or grab some data to experiment with it, you have that right inside Microsoft and you don’t need to ask permission. He did these really brilliant bureaucracy-busting things. And when we look at the revitalisation of Microsoft, we look at its share price and its market capitalisation, it’s clear that he got some things right.

When I get asked the question, can a company that finds itself in a bad place work itself out of that bad place and adopt the Geek Way, the answer is absolutely, yes, and we see a clear example with Microsoft.

Most of our readers are CTOs or heads of IT in in smaller businesses. How can they use the Geek Way in what they’re doing every day? What keywords should they keep front of mind?

Number one is to realise that you are way too fond of your own ideas. All of us, as human beings, are chronically overconfident. It’s the most common cognitive bias. That means that your brain children are going to be very, very dear to you, to the point that you’re probably unable to see the holes and the flaws. So that’s a problem.

The solution is other people. This is how science works. This is why I describe one of the great geek norms is simply as “science”. Science is really subjecting your ideas to the scrutiny of other people, and then having evidence-based discussions about the merits of those ideas. Is this good? Is this correct or not? One thing you can absolutely start doing is being a little less fond of your own ideas and stress testing those ideas early and often with other people.

Another thing we can do is acknowledge other people’s good ideas. Just start saying, “That’s a really good idea, thanks. I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe we should take a different approach here.” Those kinds of statements are super powerful, especially when they are coming from leader in an organisation, because as humans we are wired to take are cues from the people who have high status in an organisation. especially coming from leaders in an organisation. Because it turns out that that we humans are wired to take our cues from the from the people with high status in an organisation. And if you start behaving that way, other people will too.

Whereas if you fall back on this classic defensive posture where you’re not willing to admit fault or accept and you just dig in your heels, that’s also a signal the organisation will pick that up as well.

And when you are being challenged and a debate breaks out when somebody lower down the org chart presents some evidence, the organisation will watch. Are you going to shut that person down or are you going to listen and accept if they’ve won the argument?

A final thing you can do is start removing some of the Bureaucracy, some of the structure, some of the approval loops. Do you really need to sign off on every purchase over $50? You can just start getting rid of that organisational clutter. And again, that’s a signal and we humans are great at picking up and interpreting signals.

The Geek Way will be published by Pan Macmillan on 16 November

More Tech Leader Q&As

Yoshua Bengio – ‘Powerful tech will yield concentration of wealth’ – Professor Yoshua Bengio, one of the godfathers of AI, on which sectors will be revolutionized by AI, the need for tighter regulation, and whether AI poses an existential threat

Elizabeth Renieris – ‘Our robot overlords aren’t quite here just yet’ – Elizabeth Renieris is a renowned artificial intelligence ethics expert, who believes that Big Tech is being disingenuous when it calls for a global AI super-regulator. Existing laws cover AI, she says, we just need to leverage them

Ashish Gupta – ‘You can’t be an averagely talented programmer’ – Ashish Kumar Gupta, head of EMEA for global IT services company HCLTech, believes AI will make truly skilled programmers even more valuable. The key to surviving the AI jobs purge will be to combine your tech skills with another business vertical, he says

Pat McAfee’s rise in the sports media landscape has been meteoric, as the former player-turned-media personality put his imprint on radio, TV, podcasting, and ESPN’s “College GameDay”—all at the same time.

It has also generated no shortage of controversy, and experts say McAfee reflects a changing sports landscape at ESPN and beyond.

“He's a performer,” Prof. Mark Hyman, director of the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism at the University of Maryland, said. “That's what ESPN is seeking and is paying him to be. He's bringing eyeballs to ‘College GameDay.’ That's the bottom line.”

A punter with personality before becoming a professional wrestler and later a media star, McAfee brought his YouTube-based “The Pat McAfee Show” to ESPN in May with a five-year, $85 million contract. This fall, he arrived on the “College GameDay” set.

Although criticized for adapting his show for mainstream cable, ratings for the first four weeks on ESPN, from Sept. 7–29, show his popularity has continued, averaging 1.4 million viewers per show across both platforms.

Viewership on “College GameDay” is averaging 1.956 million, the second-most-watched year of the show, behind only 2.043 million viewers in 2022.

Challenges And Critics

But McAfee has also faced challenges and critics.

He joined ESPN weeks before the network laid off multiple high-profile personalities, including Jeff Van Gundy, Max Kellerman and Suzy Kolber, as well as “College GameDay” mainstays Gene Wojciechowski and David Pollack, whose seat is now occupied by McAfee.

Among McAfee’s biggest gaffs was a tweet about convicted sex offender Larry Nassar designing Michigan State’s alternate uniforms and the time on “College GameDay” he criticized Washington State, proclaiming, “Shut up, Washington State. I’m about sick of you.”

Perhaps no move gained more attention or vitriol than the revelation he paid New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rogers more than $1 million annually to come on the show and talk football, as well as conspiracy theories.

Ben Koo, founder of Awful Announcing, said McAfee represents a face of sports media that started changing with the digital arrival of Barstool Sports in 2007 and made sports coverage more about entertaining than purely informing an audience—a change that proved extremely lucrative.

“It’s not surprising that other media companies are paying attention to that and, to some extent, following,” Koo said. “There's an audience for people who get in front of the camera and perform the way Pat McAfee does. If there's an audience and it can be monetized, it's probably going to end up on TV.”

Koo said ESPN and parent company Disney brought McAfee on board to address a growing concern that younger audiences were not buying into the brand as much as the prior generation had since the start of the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network in 1979.

That move is also represented in the hiring from Bleacher Report of Omar Raja, who serves as a commentator for ESPN’s digital and social content and, like McAfee, has brought edgy and sometimes controversial content—and a lot of eyeballs—to the company’s channels.

“It seems like it's paid off in the sense that I don't think anybody has talked about ESPN quite as much as they have in the last couple months,” Koo said.

ESPN’s Brand

Despite the return on investment, there has also been a price extracted from ESPN, namely in the respect for journalistic standards that appear to have softened, Koo said.

“Something you're seeing come into play more and more is [ESPN saying] these guys solve a big problem for us, and we’ll give them a lot of leash to get the results,” he said. “The juice is worth the squeeze, even though we do have these editorial headaches or weird moments where people are questioning what we do.”

ESPN has long been known as much for reporting news as it has for providing commentary and covering games. It has also featured some of the sports world’s best journalists, including Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Fainaru, CNN veteran Mike Fish, Washington Post veteran Michael Fletcher, and feature writer Katie Barnes.

Some of McAfee’s actions create a challenge for the network that, in 2019, changed its name from “The Worldwide Leader in Sports” to “Serving Fans. Anytime. Anywhere.”

“Journalists don't pay for interviews; it crosses too many ethical lines to count,” Hyman said. “But Pat McAfee isn't a journalist, so the rules don't apply. Journalists go to the story; they gather information, they piece together facts. Whatever you think of Pat McAfee, that’s not what he's doing.”

Fan criticism of his work on “College GameDay” has so far kept McAfee from re-signing with “College GameDay,” stating on X, formerly known as Twitter, “I’m not right for some crowds, and the ‘distinguished’ College Football folks are definitely one of those.”

Koo agreed that McAfee is not for everyone, but he added that sports fans who seek more straight-up analysis from experts can still find it in more focused environments like the Big Ten Network or behind paywalls like The Athletic.

No matter McAfee’s path, big personalities like his will continue to dominate networks like ESPN, Koo predicted.

The reason: It’s what viewers want.

“A lot of people are under the impression that ESPN is forcing this on us,” Koo said. “They are, but it's really us as an audience that is pointing them in that direction.”

As a Visitor Information Specialist Volunteer, you will engage with visitors and inspire them to plan memorable and exciting experiences across the Smithsonian. Volunteers provide essential services to the Smithsonian by providing a warm welcome and useful information to our visitors about Smithsonian exhibitions, activities, services, and more. If you’re looking for a volunteer role that allows you to meet people from around the world, learn about new and exciting things happening at the Smithsonian, and be at the center of the action, this position is for you!

Qualifications

Dynamic and friendly individuals 18 years or older who have a desire to talk with visitors and share their enthusiasm for the Smithsonian and all that it has to offer. Also looking for people who...

• show excellent customer service skills
• are approachable and outgoing
• enjoy working with diverse people
• have strong computer skills
• Foreign-language skills are a plus.

Applicants must be able to volunteer for a minimum of one year, once a week or once every other weekend. Regular shift times are 4 hours in length.

Locations

Visitor Information certified serve at Information Desks across the Smithsonian, including:

Training

Training is provided for all Visitor Information certified through the Office of Visitor Services and is a prerequisite to service. Training for the next class of Visitor Information certified will begin in the spring of 2024. 

Placement Process

We are not yet accepting applications for this assignment. Once applications are open, the placement process is to: 

1. Complete an online application
2. Interview with a staff member to ensure mutual fit
3. Receive tentative placement and initiate a background check
4. Attend and complete online and in-person training
5. Start volunteering!

More Information

Please check back in early 2024 for updated information about this assignment. Contact Abbey Earich at EarichA@si.edu with questions about this assignment. Visit https://vol.si.edu/pages/opportunities to find other opportunities that may be recruiting now.