Purpose. A project that used health information technology (IT) to provide after-hours pharmacy coverage to critical access hospitals in northeast Minnesota is described.

Early intervention for students at risk of academic difficulty can be more effectively accomplished using a team-based approach that capitalizes on the expertise of many in a pharmacy education community. This commentary advocates for better integration of assessment professionals, pharmacy faculty, and student support services to capture academic, accountability, and behavior-related data that might signal student intellectual and/or behavioral challenges and manifest as marginal academic performance. Assessment professionals can assist with creating data dashboards/monitoring systems, recognizing trends within the data, refining formulas to identify at-risk students, and measuring the impact of interventions to determine which approaches positively and significantly influence outcomes. Effective early warning and intervention efforts take a village and should go beyond narrowly-focused attempts that fail to account for the complexity of students as individuals or acknowledge the multifaceted skill set students are expected to develop to become competent and responsible pharmacists.

Truly personalized precision medicine combines pharmacogenomics (PGx), a person’s lived medication experiences and ethics; person-centeredness lies at the confluence of these considerations. A person-centered perspective can help inform PGx-related treatment guidelines, shared decision-making for PGx-related therapeutics and PGx-related healthcare policy. This article examines the interplay between these components of person-centered PGx-related care. Ethics concepts addressed include privacy, confidentiality, autonomy, informed consent, fiduciary responsibility, respect, the burden of pharmacogenomics knowledge for both the patient and healthcare provider and the pharmacist’s ethical role in PGx-testing. Incorporating the patient’s lived medication experience and ethics principles into PGx-based discussions of treatment can optimize the ethical, person-centered application of PGx testing to patient care.

Objective. To describe how Ethics content, formerly taught as a third-year stand-alone course, was incorporated into nine didactic courses across all three years, and into IPPEs and APPEs in a newly-integrated, two-campus PharmD curriculum at the University of Minnesota. Curriculum changes were intended to (1) provide students with opportunities to discuss and apply Ethics concepts several times throughout the curriculum, and (2) highlight Ethics topics relevant to material students were learning in the host course at the time. Methods. The free-standing one-credit required Ethics course from the old curriculum was eliminated. Partnering with Course Directors from nine required courses across all three years of the didactic curriculum and with the Office of Experiential Education, an Integrated Ethics syllabus was created that provided each class of approximately 170 students with at least one credit of didactic Ethics instruction and added Ethics activities to the experiential curriculum. Learning approaches include lecture, case analysis and discussions with preceptors. Assessment approaches include written case analysis, multiple-choice and true/false questions, case vignette-based short-answer essay questions, and student discussions with preceptors. Results. Students consistently rate the Ethics sessions as useful, but some students find repeated application of the ethics problem-solving framework tedious and repetitive. Conclusion. It is possible to embed Ethics topics within different courses as part of an integrated PharmD curriculum rather than offer a stand-alone Ethics course at a single time point in the curriculum. Students report appreciating this integration approach. Challenges remain to adequately assess student ability to apply Ethics principles.