Amy Grimes, PharmD received The Richard L. Simmons, MD, Speak Up for Patient Safety Award. This award honors Dr. Simmons’s dedication to improving the quality of health care and patient safety. Dr. Simmons is a leader in advancing methods for measuring and reporting health care quality and expanding the public’s capacity to evaluate and understand these metrics. This award honors those who embody Dr. Simmons’ values of passion for patient safety in caring for patients.
Her nomination reads: Amy is a clinical pharmacist who is an exemplary role model for patient safety relating to Transitional Care Management (TCM). In 2019, Amy started leading a small workgroup of pharmacists at UPMC St. Margaret, who was charged with designing workflows/best practices for TCM initiatives in the outpatient practices. Amy had the foresight to expand this TCM workgroup starting in 2020 to a multi-disciplinary group, including practice managers, nurses, and office coordinators affiliated with TCM initiatives. Amy has led monthly Teams meetings for this multi-disciplinary group to share updates/ideas/questions and created a Teams page for sharing resources. Starting in 2021, Amy has led a UPMC Health system wide TCM Pharmacists Networking Group to focus on sharing ideas, helping others solve problems by sharing best practices and to understand how one transition affects another transition. From this larger TCM Pharmacists Networking Group, she also has created smaller breakout groups that report back to the larger group at quarterly meetings. All of us who know and work with Amy are fortunate to be part of these TCM groups, which help us improve TCM initiatives and ultimately improve patient care.
