Steven Chen
USC School of Pharmacy
Part detective, part primary-care provider, part teacher, Steven Chen represents the vanguard in a profession as old as the caveman.
Chen is a pharmacist.
If you think pharmacists are just the folks who pour pills into amber jars with child-proof caps, you’re about 50 years behind the times.
Today’s drug specialists are well-paid and well-respected, clinically trained, ethically and culturally sensitized professionals who play a critical role in a health system that increasingly treats them as the physician’s partner, not underling.
A clinical pharmacist formerly based at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Chen now sees patients at three USC-affiliated safety-net clinics for indigent and uninsured Angelenos. For many people on maintenance drugs for chronic conditions— such as hypertension, heart failure, high cholesterol, diabetes or asthma — someone like Chen is a logical primary-care provider. He’s got drug-therapy training that is the envy of everyone on the medical team. And he’s fully authorized under protocol to examine patients, perform diagnostic tests, order labwork, administer drugs and modify therapy as he sees fit.
“In the clinics where I work,” Chen explains, “the doctors refer to me all the patients they would like to know what to do with — the guy whose blood pressure isn’t responding to meds, the one with high cholesterol who can’t handle statins, the cardio patient who suffers from frequent fluid overload.”
“I’m a detective,” Chen adds. “I get to figure out why the patient is failing to respond to a drug regimen. The reason I never get bored is because it’s never the same.”
Chen calls pharmacists “the most accessible health-care professionals.” When you think about it, there’s one in every pharmacy, available for consultation without appointment, rain or shine, on the weekend and in the wee hours.”