Sandra Salverson, PharmD ’96

BY JESSICA CANLAS

As senior vice president of pharmacy services at OSF HealthCare, Sandra Salverson, PharmD ’96, boasts a career spanning more than three decades. Her reputation as a dedicated and knowledgeable leader precedes her, but the start of her journey was uncertain until a pivotal experience changed the course of her life.

Born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Salverson entered Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, as a premed major. Within the first two months of her freshman year, however, Salverson became ill, received treatment at the campus clinic, then visited her local pharmacy for help in sorting out her prescriptions and the OTC remedies she’d begun taking. Unfortunately, Salverson didn’t get the answers she was looking for.

She ended up having an anaphylactoid reaction to her medications and was hospitalized. Fortunately, she recovered, but the experience impacted her deeply, sending her on a quest that would become the drive behind her professional endeavors.

“The patient counseling [I received] . . . changed the course of my path. I decided to finish college in three years and go to pharmacy school.”

Surely, there was a way for pharmacists to prevent what had happened to her, she thought.

Salverson went to UIC with an open mind, taking a variety of electives to expose herself to different elements of the profession. She admits that she “didn’t say no to a lot of things.”

By the time she earned her PharmD in 1996, she already had some retail experience under her belt, but was looking for more. She was intrigued by recent legislation that mandated improved patient counseling for Medicaid recipients.

“It disturbed me that we had to tell [pharmacists] to counsel patients,” she recalls. She felt challenged to answer what seemed to her to be key questions for the profession: “How do you solve drug-related problems? What is ‘quality care’? [Those questions have] always been a theme in what I’ve done.”

To that end, Salverson decided to pursue a pharmacy practice residency at the University of Utah Hospitals and Clinics. She was looking to accelerate the conversation around improving patient interactions and have a look at how things could be done differently.

After residency, Salverson and her husband, an agricultural engineer, decided to return to the Midwest. She took on a position at Wesley Medical Center in Wichita, Kansas. At the time, the development of standardized patient safety measures was in its infancy, and Salverson focused on pursuing best practices in counseling patients, as well as how pharmacists should assert themselves in interdisciplinary environments.

Within a year, her husband got a job opportunity in Omaha, Nebraska, and Salverson was off to the University of Nebraska Medical Center, where she became “a jack of all trades.”

Her diverse experience in areas like formulary management and drug policy gave her flexibility, and she took on a position in drug information. While there, Salverson also assisted in the University of Nebraska College of Pharmacy’s IPPE program.

“That was a pivotal experience for me,” she says. “It showed me what it would mean to lead, and how someone could impact a larger population.”

Four years later, Salverson and her growing family moved to Peoria, Illinois, where she began working at OSF St. Francis Medical Center in drug information and infectious disease.

WE ARE ON THE CONTINUED JOURNEY OF DEFINING WHAT QUALITY CARE REALLY MEANS AND HOW WE SHOULD TALK TO PATIENTS.

“Then a couple of things happened,” she recalls. “There were initial discussions around antimicrobial stewardship . . . and ‘To Err is Human’ was published.”

“To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System” was a landmark report published in 1999 by the U.S. Institute of Medicine that shed much-needed light on medical error in the United States.

Seeing an opportunity to combine her drug information skills with her infectious disease expertise while pursuing her goal of redefining patient care, Salverson took on a role as medication safety officer. During that time, she learned make recommendations for a global population, as well as how to integrate technology in that process.

Her team established an anticoagulation service with the goal of reducing bleeding events by 80 percent.

“That made me feel good. Pharmacists have a purpose—we have the drug knowledge and expertise to prevent those things from happening [to patients].”

Two years later, her husband was transferred to upstate New York, where she eventually became manager of clinical pharmacy services for St. Peter’s Health Partners in Albany, which had recently been born out of a four-hospital merger. Here, Salverson learned how to balance safety, efficacy, and cost while navigating the intricacies of a health system merger. She also oversaw their residency program, giving her the opportunity to mentor the next generation of pharmacists.

Four years later, Salverson’s family returned to Peoria, and she became vice president of pharmacy operations for OSF HealthCare. Within eight years, she

assumed her current title of senior vice president of pharmacy services, and now oversees all pharmacy services for OSF, which includes 17 hospitals, 6 community pharmacies, 1 specialty pharmacy, 1 home infusion pharmacy, and a digital pharmacy service throughout the state of Illinois.

Salverson has worked to restructure and optimize OSF’s business model with the goal of offering the highest quality care to all the communities they serve. All 17 hospitals, including rural locations, now offer 24/7 care. The health system also offers an antimicrobial stewardship program, anticoagulation dosing services, and discharge medication reconciliation review at all locations

“Now we are on the continued journey of defining what quality care really means and how we should talk to patients,” says Salverson. “When you talk to patients, it makes a difference.”

Over the course of 30 years, Salverson has built her own path on a foundation of curiosity, resilience, and care. Her contributions to the field, from patient care to mentoring the next generation of pharmacists, reflect a passion and purpose that have earned her numerous accolades, including being the two-time recipient of ICHP’s Best Practice Award.

Salverson has her sights set next on garnering recognition for OSF as a whole by applying to be an ASHP Certified Center of Excellence™ in Medication-Use Safety and Pharmacy Practice.

“We did this for two reasons,” she explains. “To elevate system-based healthcare and to provide recognition for the value of high-quality services and what that can do for our patient population.

“That is a delight. Now we are leading others in implementing quality care.”