Practitioner Profile - NPX Newsletter Winter 2018

Practitioner Profile
Jennifer Sabatino, R.Ph, PharmD

Northeastern Ohio Medical University 2013

Clinical Pharmacist with OSU General Internal Medicine

Tell us a little bit about your practice site.
OSU General Internal Medicine is a network of primary care patient-centered medical homes throughout the central Ohio area and is the primary outpatient site for the nationally-recognized Ohio State Internal Medicine Residency program.  The clinical pharmacy team interacts with 90 medical residents and 40 attending physicians to help design therapeutic plans for the management of chronic diseases for 50,000 patients in an interdisciplinary education-based setting across the network.

How long have you been an OPA member? What’s been your best experience so far?
I have been a member since 2011.  I was able to join fellow new practitioners for a day at the Ohio Statehouse.  Antonio guided us as we sat in on Committee hearings and met with our representatives to discuss issues important to the pharmacy profession.  This initial experience helped me recognize that our legislators are people with family members and friends who can benefit from the services that we provide and that I could make a difference for the profession as a whole just by having a conversation about what we do.

What’s been your favorite moment of your career so far?
Matching with my dream residency program.  Match Day was the first major “fork in the road” for my career and I will always remember the feeling immediately before opening the email and learning which direction my path was going to take.

What’s the best career advice you’ve offered or been given?
Lead from where you stand.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced as a new practitioner and how did you overcome it?   Coming in to a new practice site is always a challenge.  In addition to learning workflow processes, you have to earn the trust of the patients and providers.  The advice of my primary residency preceptor was to focus on building relationships and that is a strategy that has served me well.

What is the one thing you can’t live without?
Audiobooks!  They make the morning commute and time at the gym fly by.