Madison Shumway
Staff Writer
Pharmacy professor Rebecca Hoover wants healthcare providers to know how to find reliable information about prescription drugs, and a recently awarded grant may help.
The American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy gave its New Investigator Award, which funds the independent research and conference travel of 16 early-career pharmacy faculty members across the country, to Hoover, a clinical assistant professor in the Pharmacy Practice and Administrative Sciences department.
The grant will allow Hoover to develop her proposal, “Drug Information Education for Students in Non-Pharmacy, Non-Prescribing Health Professions,” and investigate how drug information research skills can best be taught.
“This grant has been such a game-changer in that it’s allowing me to physically do the work by taking some colleagues to help me analyze it,” Hoover said. “Also, I’ll be able to go to a conference here in a few years and be able to share that research.”
Drug information is Hoover’s specialty. She completed a specialty residency in drug information before coming to Idaho State in 2013. The field combines pharmacy with communications and education with the goal of providing reliable resources for healthcare providers and patients.
Hoover found her way to her career in drug information after earning bachelor’s degrees in biochemistry, microbiology and English from the University of Idaho and a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
This background of science and arts aids her as a pharmacist, she said.
“Communications is such a big component of healthcare, and being able to educate your patients … that fundamental communication component is priceless,” Hoover said. “I think people really underrate it.”
Hoover, the current director of Idaho Drug Information Center, sees a need for both accurate drug information resources and instruction in finding reliable ones.
There’s a crucial difference, she said, between websites like WebMD and databases like the one frequently updated by the National Institutes of Health, and health professions students need to be aware of it. She’s often surprised to see how many students Google drug information.
Since healthcare providers can’t memorize every detail about every drug they encounter, they need to develop drug-information-finding skills, she said.
“For this set of healthcare providers, I think it’s so important, because they’re so instrumental in a patient’s care, but they’re not always getting formal training in pharmacotherapy,” Hoover said. “Without research like this, it’s hard to know how much time needs to be devoted, what sort of teaching methods need to be devoted.”
Hoover’s research will attempt to answer the question of “how can we best teach drug information to healthcare providers,” by providing two hours of didactic lecture.
Tests administered before and after lectures will assess how students’ perceptions of drug information change, both immediately after the lectures and at the end of the semester.
She will present her findings at the AACP Annual Meeting in July 2018.
“Being able to have some fundamental skills to make sure they’re keeping their patients safe and utilizing trusted resources for their parents support [is necessary],” Hoover said. “A patient, you would expect them to just go to the Internet. You would expect a healthcare practitioner to be able to do more.”
