Chapter 08: Preparing to Leave Anderson and A View of What’s Been Accomplished
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Identifier
AndersonR_01_20040518_C08
Publication Date
5-18-2004
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Roger W. Anderson, PhD, Oral History Interview, May 18, 2004
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject - Joining MD Anderson/Coming to Texas; Overview; An Institutional Unit; MD Anderson History; MD Anderson Snapshot
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Lesley Williams Brunet:
And why are they letting you leave?
Roger W. Anderson, PhD:
Well, it’ll go on. It’ll go on. It’s no problem. It’ll go on. I hope it will go on with the same idea to continue to grow that, but I have not had, since those data have been available, and I use them a lot. And we’ve got an absolutely tremendous CFO now. I mean, we’ve always had some good people in finance, but the best one we’ve ever had, I’ve ever had, is Ben Nelson who is here now. Actually if you look in The Messenger this month they’ve got a story on him. But anyway, he’s the best one I’ve ever worked with. Well, he usually -- and it goes back to Mr. Gilley. He’s the new Mr. Gilley. But anyway, he normally -- CFOs would be the ones that would cut at the end. You know, they’d say, oh, well, you don’t need that. I mean, even if the administrator got convinced. Because that’s the way it was early on, even though Mr. Gilley was pretty good to me, although I think I earned it, but he at the end of the day, on a budget, could reduce it just before it got approved. Well, Ben Nelson has been never in the last close to almost -- well, all the years he’s been here and even a few before him would never cut our budget because he always thinks it’s a better investment, why don’t we want to hire more? If I would say, well, this next year we want to hire four more of these people, he’d say, well, why don’t you hire eight? Because he’s thinking of the return. And it’s been true all this time. It’s been true that the incremental numbers will have a higher return. Now, we’re not happy with 40 yet. We’ll have more than 40 but we won’t have 100. Now, that 40 is of 200 because we have 200 total pharmacists.
Lesley Williams Brunet:
Oh, I was -- I don’t know why I was thinking it was 250-something.
Roger W. Anderson, PhD:
Well, it’s not 250. It’s 2-something. I can’t even keep track of what it is but it’s 200 plus pharmacists today. But that 40 is the clinical specialist group. Now, at the same time that we’re doing their stuff, we’re also enhancing the clinical role of all of our pharmacists, so it’s not even just them. It’s really other pharmacists doing clinical things too. In fact, my desire is to have 80% of all pharmacist time out of the pharmacy. And in fact, our central pharmacy across the hall today is the busiest pharmacy in the entire United States regardless of bed size, and because of the robotics and because of the outsourcing and because of our clinical functions and things we can do on the nursing units, it generally operates with two pharmacists.
Lesley Williams Brunet:
The whole pharmacy?
Roger W. Anderson, PhD:
Day shift, supervising, the technicians, being sure that the robotics are working correctly and all of that. It’s phenomenal.
Lesley Williams Brunet:
That is amazing.
Roger W. Anderson, PhD:
And you know, in a normal pharmacy, even staff like they are at Methodist or St. Luke’s there would probably have to be 20 or something in there. But because of the fact that we’ve done what we’ve done with the efficiency of distribution -- and, in fact, everything is safer, too, and that’s another part of the study. The robot that we put in, for example. You’ve heard a little bit about that but the robot does 5000 doses a day and has yet to make in 10 years now, pretty much 10 years, has not made one mistake yet. In our old manual system of 5000 doses a day it took three checks to get past four errors a day.
Lesley Williams Brunet:
Yeah, I can understand that.
Roger W. Anderson, PhD:
So, you know, 5000 manipulations, you’re going to have human things, but the robotic device with barcodes has yet to make its first mistake, knock on wood. But --
Lesley Williams Brunet:
Now, was the robotics system the first in the country?
Roger W. Anderson, PhD:
NO, it was the first in Houston. We were 12th in the country to put in that one robot, that one specific robot.
Lesley Williams Brunet:
I haven’t actually seen it.
Roger W. Anderson, PhD:
You haven’t seen it?
Lesley Williams Brunet:
Pictures. I’ve just seen pictures.
Roger W. Anderson, PhD:
Oh. I could show you that. It’s right across the hall. But anyway, probably the bigger impact than the robot on staffing and the ability to redeploy, that was a term, we’re going to redeploy pharmacists from other functions. Now, in the process of redeploying I upgraded some of them to the clinical specialist because even as great I believe as all pharmacists are when they come out of school you still need this additional training for what we’re having them do. So, on this drug therapy management authority to do this prescribing, we don’t do this to all pharmacists. It’s really to just this group of 40 clinical specialists. So, anyway, that has been -- well, it was great.
Recommended Citation
Anderson, Roger W. PhD and Brunet, Lesley W., "Chapter 08: Preparing to Leave Anderson and A View of What’s Been Accomplished" (2004). Interview Chapters. 379.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/379
Conditions Governing Access
Open
