>> My name is Daniel Mancini.
I'm a Pharmacist at the UPMC Health Plan, downtown Pittsburgh here.
I went to the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy here at Pitt, and currently,
my current job, like I said, I work mostly for the health plan, so it's on the insurance side
of things and it's kind of behind the scenes really.
It's not really an area of pharmacy which people would tend
to think that, that's what you'd be going into.
It's not your typical retail pharmacy, it's not your typical hospital pharmacy, however,
it is like I said, behind the scenes.
So a typical day for me includes reviewing what we call utilization criteria
for certain prescriptions.
For instance, if your doctor writes a prescription
that doesn't actually treat what you're supposed to be sick for,
we take a look at that on certain medications.
Not only for a cost basis, but for a safety basis,
and so that's typically what I do for the most part of the day.
I also speak with physicians who may call in and try and get someone medications approved
or denied, and information on what necessarily they need to do.
Now, that's my job.
Other people in my department, and I'm fairly new, as I just recently started,
so I will be doing some of those tasks as well, but some of my colleagues work in the area
of seeing if patients who are older and elderly are compliant with their medications.
So they'll give the phone calls and see if they're adhering to their medications,
and I'm going to be doing some of that in the future here as well.
So that first part that I spoke about is kind of not all-inclusive, and in the future,
I'm going to be doing more reviewing newer drugs that come out.
As you might know in the news, there's some very expensive new medications
that are called specialty medications, and many of these, again, on a safety and cost profile,
need to be taken look at by pharmacists and people within health plans.
So they have to come up with that criteria for, you know, appropriate use
and appropriateness in general for these patients.
So that's part of what's being done there as well,
and I'm going to get into that in the future too.
So I've been working there since June of this year, so it's now October,
so it's been about four months, and I can say that, you know, I've just reached the tip
of the iceberg, and there's many more experiences and things to come.