Hi all! I hope all is well since my last blog post. If you’re reading this from anywhere in the Midwest or east coast I hope the snow hasn’t dampened your spirit too much. But hey, at least you have a great excuse to drink as much coffee, tea, or hot chocolate as you want! I wanted to let you all know about a unique intern opportunity we have here at Ohio State. We have one of four active Medication Therapy Management Telehealth centers for SinfoniaRx, a Tabula Rasa HealthCare company. As an intern at the Medication Management Program you have the opportunity to impact the lives of people across the entire country. One of the nice things with this position is that as you progress through the PharmD program you get more responsibilities and can counsel on more disease states including hypertension, osteoporosis, COPD and asthma, diabetes, and chronic heart failure to name a few. This is one of the only jobs where you can learn about a drug or disease state in class and start counseling on it the exact same day. I also really enjoy getting to work with a variety of students who are at different levels in their schooling. MMP employs over 100 students as both technicians and interns! While students are a large driving force of the MMP there are also full-time and part-time technicians and pharmacists who work there. My team has some great undergraduate technicians who are eager to learn more about different disease states and medications. My pharmacist lets me to spend time with those individuals to help explain what is happening with the drug or the condition which in turn helps me learn it better. You honestly do get paid to learn in this job.
As I mentioned earlier we have the opportunity to contact thousands of patients across the country with this job. One of my favorite success stories I have as an intern at the MMP is an encounter I had while checking on a member’s diabetes. I knew they take insulin and I wanted to check in to see if they were having any issues with their blood sugars dropping too low. As I continued chatting with them I learned that they were in fact having episodes of low sugars and that they were using insulin because they thought it was going to help their sugars go back up. In that moment, I was then able to properly counsel them on what would be best to get their sugars back up. I then proceeded to tell them what their insulin was actually doing in their body and how it was helping the diabetes. At the end, they were so grateful because no one had taken the time to explain how everything worked and why they were using insulin. I can honestly say that interning here has helped elevate my counseling and patient interviewing skills. Once here, if you are still interested be sure to look out for an information session at the college during one of our hiring periods! You can also reach out to our Career Services Office here at the college. If you would like any more information about SinfoniaRx and the national impact it has feel free to check out the website at https://sinfoniarx.com.
Good luck this semester and here’s to hoping the groundhog doesn’t see his shadow in a few weeks!
Chelsea