Dr. David Vu innovates by using formal pharmacy training to bring additional value to roles that span other industries

Name: David Vu

Position: QA Engineer + Project Manager at Kit Check

Interview Summary

Matt [00:00:00] Matt Paterini here with The Nontraditional Pharmacist, part of the Pharmacy Podcast Network. Boy we have a great show today. Special guest, David Vu, is joining The Nontraditional Pharmacist show today and he’s a great TNP guest for a couple of reasons. Number one, excellent nontraditional role at Kit Check as a QA engineer among other roles and responsibilities, we’re going to talk about all of that and learn about his role there. He’s a champion of pharmacy informatics, and number three all around just an awesome dude. So David welcome to TNP, thanks for joining.

David [00:00:34] Hey Matt. Thanks for having me on.

Matt [00:00:37] Absolutely looking forward to it. We’ll get right into it. Let’s start with your current role. What is your current role? I mean I said it was a QA engineer at Kit Check. What the heck does that mean? What is really your current role, kind of a description of your day-to-day responsibilities and what you do.

David [00:00:54] Yeah I’ll give you guys a little bit of backstory. So I recently graduated in May of 2018 from VCU School of Pharmacy in Virginia and I work for a company called Kit Check, which is a Health I.T. Company that focuses on improving pharmacy workflow by providing automated medication management solutions. So currently I work as one of the project managers and QA engineers for Kit Check, where I primarily work on Bluesight for controlled substances and I’ll go definitely go down exactly what that is. And just a fun fact about Kit Check and I didn’t tell you Matt, but our Chief Technology Officer is actually one of the founders for Xbox and actually presented one of the initial designs for it. So it’s really cool to have someone like him in a pharmacy software setting. And so me being in healthcare technology, I never dreamed of being able to collaborate with someone like that. So that’s just a little bit about Kit Check. In terms of the work that I do, so I was mentioning I primarily work on Bluesight for controlled controlled substances, which is a management tool that provides 100% coverage of controlled substances audit. So in hospitals the current methods of drug diversion detection is a really manual process which requires a lot of sifting through large volumes of data from different systems. And so what Bluesight does, it takes that information, applies machine learning algorithms, really to detect abnormal patterns in provider behavior and be able to surface any type of outliers or end users to investigate. So with Bluesight, my work mainly consists of feature testing, data analysis, and mainly working on the implementation of customer Go Lives from a data perspective and making sure that everything is being met in a very timely manner. So in my line of work I touch nearly every team in my company, so I can be working with my implementation team, being part of customer facing calls, I could be working with my support team providing understanding of the logic codes, I could be working with the engineering team, collaborating with new product features or providing clinical content behind some feature requests that we have, but as a QA engineer that role, it’s actually really similar to being a pharmacist where a pharmacist, they are looking at prescriptions, they’re seeing what exactly is wrong the prescription (if there is any), and then they’re determining if there is clinical relevancy for that medication and for that patient. But then they’ll go out and make recommendations to the doctors if there’s any issues and they’ll go ahead and remedy it. So same thing applies in my QAengineer position where we’re identifying problems in the source code for bugs and stuff like that and then making recommendations to developers to be able to augment and change the codes in order to fix that. And so that’s eerily similar to being a pharmacist like I was mentioning. So that’s my QA position. The other position that I have is functioning as a project manager for our software application, the Bluesight that I was mentioning, and being in charge of managing the timelines of implementations for all of our hospitals that are going live. So a lot of the things, a lot of the stuff that I’m doing, it’s it’s kind of all over the board, but it’s great. I love it. It’s of so much variety I can’t even handle it. So right now it’s really great because as a pharmacist in the company, and the only pharmacist in the engineering team, I become a really great accessible resource to the rest of my team to really answer any type of clinical workflow or clinical questions that they have and having that understanding because in my role also I do a lot of the coding for our hospitals. And so being able to understand functionality, how would the end user perceive our software and our application and having that true understanding in order to make a good product. So that’s that’s my role in a small excerpt. In a nutshell.

Matt [00:05:07] Such an awesome role. My question is how did you get into that? I know when we were talking originally and when we first started talking about this role I was like wow this is so cool, there’s all different kinds of things you’re doing here but like you said you don’t even necessarily need to have a pharmacy degree for this role. Is that correct? And then how did you get into this because it’s such a nontraditional unique path to take from pharmacy school?

David [00:05:29] Yeah definitely. So I’ll explain to you in terms of the backstory a little bit. During pharmacy school I was really interested in pharmacy informatics, so working with any type of technology and dealing with you know pharmacy right. And one of the things that I worked on during my time, I took an elective, a pharmacy informatics elective, and one of the things that we did during that time was we just so happened to implement Kit Check. So Kit Check has two products, one of them being Bluesight, the other one is their flagship product called Kit Check which is a hardware system that utilizes RFID technology or radio frequency identifier technology to improve verification and medication management of all the medications in the hospital, especially in OR trays and any type of medication tray that exists. And so I was working through my school as helping out with the implementation with Kit Check. And so I would be able to train pharmacy technicians on how to utilize the product and give them a better understanding in terms of the workflow behind it. So when I worked with Kit Check, that general understanding of their mission which is improving the efficiency within healthcare and the hospital. And so that’s a lot of what I really resonate with is just I am a big advocate for overall efficiency in anything. So that really connected with me really well. And so as I was going out a couple years later and I ended up graduating, I passing my boards, and I was looking out for positions and one of those positions have to to be a data analyst position for Kit Check. It was a contract position and it was a position that required a bachelors and some background in healthcare, but having a strong understanding of data analysis. So to analyze that position, it didn’t require a pharmacist to be a data analysts, but when I interviewed with them and I was competing against at that time other statisticians for that job and I ultimately was able to get that job because of my understanding in pharmacy, being able to understand the workflow patterns of pharmacy in general. And so you know getting that position it was very beneficial for the company just because there’s 60 people in the company, I was the first pharmacist and first and only pharmacists to join the engineering team. So being a relatively accessible resource to the rest of the staff to answer any questions. And so I was able to provide a lot of value to my company that way. But at the same time, my company provided a lot of value to me because as a smaller company the things that I do, I’m able to make large impacts towards the end result of my product. And that ultimately ends up to the customer. So being able to feel like I am making a significant contributions towards a company that was really great. And so you know having that attitude and having a hustler mentality of just working hard like any other pharmacists (they work extremely hard) and you know pushing further and further and so I was able to provide a lot of value as a data analyst and eventually took me on in a full-time position as a QA engineer in a couple months, then a couple months later after that I was helping out with essentially imagine collaborative practice with pharmacists and physicians where pharmacists are serving in some capacity as a physician, so I was functioning the same way as a QA engineer and a developer, so being able to develop the source code for my hospitals and if you understand that analogy. So then a couple months later after that I ended up becoming one of the project managers and that sort of the data quality and implementation of customer go lives. So it was a huge rocket in terms of the roadmap that I had, just because you know initially when I took the data analysts position like I was mentioning it wasn’t a pharmacist position. And generally when people go out of pharmacy school you know they want to become a pharmacist and really make cool, 100% use of the degree. But at the end of the day I was just thinking about it. Because at that time I was being offered several jobs. Staff pharmacist positions, hospital, retail, Epic informatics position, those were on the table and I have a data analyst position. So I ultimately chose the data analyst position because you know at the core of it, I felt like I am an innovator at heart and I just so happen to be a pharmacist. So I didn’t really want to have to really justify getting a degree, but definitely getting a degree would not gotten me to where I am right now because of the past experiences that I’ve had and the skills I learned from pharmacy school. And so taking that and thinking myself as an innovator I really rocketed myself to a great position. You got to start off from the bottom and just work your way up. And it’s great. It’s been less than 10 months. And from data analysts to Project Manager and so right now I feel in terms of my career path moving forward, I feel very uncapped just because I have the technical mindset and the clinical mindset to really do whatever I want and that’s the greatest feeling.

Matt [00:11:20] I love that story and it’s so different for everyone. You know everyone’s path is very different and your path is actually a very good example of leveraging both kind of the direct skills of a pharmacist, but also the indirect skills and I think people forget about that, especially in the pharmacy world. Like you mentioned, the number one goal coming out of pharmacy school is to get a pharmacy job. Why is that the case necessarily? Well because you have the formal training, you’ve made a significant investment both time and money into obtaining that degree in those credentials so it naturally makes sense that you would want to pursue a formal career in that area after, but the career and job market is changing for pharmacists, so it’s not necessarily the case and people have to go through their own mental thought process on how to get to that path that makes the most sense for them. So I love the story and appreciate you sharing and being open a little bit about how you mentally went through that process to get where you are today. I guess I would ask next about how that professional, all that professional stuff that we’ve been talking about, how does that impact you personally? How does it fit in with your personal goals in life? In general? Because that’s just as important.

David [00:12:32] Yeah absolutely. So my number one goal is I want to be able to impact patients in a grandiose scale. Thinking about it when I was working back in retail, even though I had a lot of patient interaction, I was able to help out and go above and beyond to help my customers and my patients and have that relationship. I definitely was feeling like it was a 1-on-1 impact and it was just they were coming through, coming back in a week or so. But thinking about myself and the impact that I want to make in health care and as an individual, I wanted to make a large impact. And so that’s why I joined and entered into healthcare technology, because of a lot of things that I would be able to do, it would not only just affect one patient but many patients really downstream. So I would be really satisfied knowing that the work that I do would have long lasting contributions to overall patient health and so many states and the like. So being able to make that huge impact from maybe even making code, doing a little bit of coding to be able to provide some value to a clinician or a pharmacist to free up their time, release some of their pain points so they could do what’s important, which is helping out and focusing on their patients. So that’s really a huge downstream trickle effect. Even though I don’t have that 1-on-1 patient direction, I’m really satisfied knowing that I indirectly impact patients on the grandiose scale.

Matt [00:14:16] What advice would you give to pharmacy students, I guess even pharmacists too, if they’re looking to maybe pursue a career, a new career, or a career change in the pharmacy informatics realm, maybe not necessarily data analyst, but maybe something close, what advice would you give to folks looking to make that change in their career path?

David [00:14:36] Yeah. So the biggest advice I would give someone is really have a questioning attitude. So my core ideologies are you know I look at some process or technology and I just think, how could this be faster? How could this be better? How could this be more efficient? Because I think a lot of the times we we think about that stuff, but we feel disempowered by you know this is out of my control, you know corporate is dealing with it. If I make any recommendations then my voice isn’t going to be heard and then people may get discouraged. That’s a way of thinking that we have as innovators by pharmacy informaticists, by people in healthcare technology is being able to identify pain points, personal pain points and other people’s pain points, see if you’re able to try to resolve it by developing a solution or improving some type of process or augmenting organizational structure. You have that sense of thinking all the time. It’s crazy in terms of the creativity that comes behind it. And then moving forward, if you’re interested in that healthcare technology, that sort of mindset is highly beneficial because you’re able to make the product better, you’re able to develop a product after that, then you know utilize that and then help out your customers, help out your patients, and you know alleviate a lot of their pain points that way. And so that’s one way of you know that mode of thinking would definitely go a long way in this type of field. My next few advice would just be you know go out and start talking to people. Go and talk to me, message me on LinkedIn in terms of and ask other people what are the skill sets that are necessary for a job. Is there anything they also do in terms of experiences? Just because I think about it. You know there’s a lot of people that have made a lot of progress in their career already. Right. And so reaching out to them is just a simple LinkedIn message of “hey I just was really interested in your career.” And kind of backing track in terms exactly what did they do to really get them to a position. See if you’re able to trend some sort of data of “Hey I’ve done this internship” or “I’ve done this experiences” and really stepped into that path and reverse engineer someone that’s already a few steps ahead of you in a position that you really crave as a dream position, and kind of working yourself backwards that way. So those are several ways that you’re able to really get to that. And also thinking about you know not being able, not feeling like you’re going to fail. Or sorry, feeling like a failure actually would be a good phrase, because you do want to fail. You want to really fail fast and not be afraid to fail, because the faster you fail, sure that might be great at first, but you’re able to learn from it and you’re able to grow from it and you’re able to build up to experiences and you know that promotes you, encourages you to work and think outside the box that way. And then you could think back like if I didn’t do that then where I am right now would’ve never happened. So taking the risks to fail and simply try as many things as much as possible.

Matt [00:18:09] A couple of great things that I heard there were talk with a lot of different people and get their experiences to really learn from, not only what they did well to get where they are today but also maybe where they have made mistakes along the way and kind of learn from that and build your own set of experiences to help direct your career path, your career exploration to finally fit into it in an area and a career that fits you best because it’s different for everyone. So I would like to kind of conclude the show, David, with getting your thoughts on, and I’m very interested to hear your thoughts on this question which is what do you think is the future of the pharmacy profession?

David [00:18:48] Definitely. So I think the pharmacy is headed towards an area where technology will be a prominent player in healthcare in really more ways than one. So big data and analytics, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, block chain, and much more. So this intersection between healthcare and technology is definitely where our pharmacy profession is going towards. Because if you’re able to use technology to be able to either save money, generate money, or provide better care, more efficient care and that involves so much of the human factors involved, and have technology be able to provide that data, provide that information to you front hand is key to having less costly healthcare to our patients and just overall improving the quality of the healthcare treatment for our patients too.

Matt [00:19:50] Thanks a lot David for joining The Nontraditional Pharmacist. We certainly appreciate your time. Remember everyone hey, one of the things that I liked most about this episode and this show is being able to learn from all of the different experiences. David’s a great example of not only a nontraditional pharmacist, but also the way he thinks about approaches his career moving forward. Excellent, excellent stuff. Please share the show with your network, connect with David on LinkedIn. We look forward to seeing everyone next time on The Nontraditional Pharmacist, part of the Pharmacy Podcast Network.