Chief Pharmacy Officer Jason R. Smith on the Challenges Health Systems Face

Jason R. Smith, Pharm.D.

Since being named chief pharmacy officer for the University of Rochester Medical Center, effective Feb. 16, 2025, Jason R. Smith, Pharm.D., has been on a listening journey, meeting with pharmacy employees throughout the health system. His goal is to build a stronger workforce in the department of pharmacy.

“Our teams were struggling with technician staffing, and that’s why I'm putting the focus on the workforce,” Smith said in an interview. “If we can build that strong labor force, if we can have the best team possible, the execution of any strategic plan is going to work better.”

Smith took over the role of chief pharmacy officer from Curtis Haas, Pharm.D., who has retired. Smith had served as senior director of Ambulatory Pharmacy Services, where he previously worked as the director. He earned his doctor of pharmacy degree from Albany College of Pharmacy

“I’ve been with the organization for 10 years now, and I started in the acute care space,” he said. “Over the course of these years, I've been able to build a lot of meaningful programs that add a lot of value. We’ve increased the number of patients that we service, and we've overwhelmingly had positive feedback on that from all the providers and our patients.”

The University of Rochester Medical Center is an academic medical center with six hospitals located throughout the Finger Lakes and Southern Tier regions. These include Strong Memorial, Highland, F.F. Thompson, Noyes Memorial, Jones Memorial, and St. James hospitals. The health system also includes Golisano Children’s Hospital, James P. Wilmot Cancer Center, Eastman Institute for Oral Health, UR Medicine Home Care, the Highlands at Pittsford and Highlands at Brighton, and nine urgent care centers.

While senior director of Ambulatory Pharmacy Services, Smith opened in 2018 a 24-hour outpatient pharmacy at Strong Memorial Hospital, which he said is unique in health systems. “We’ve tripled our volume since we’ve done that, and we’re able to help facilitate discharges for patients who need to leave the hospital anytime,” he said. “It was always a challenge in the past when the pharmacies weren’t necessarily open on the weekend or late. Now we can discharge a patient on the weekend with their outpatient meds and free that bed up. We also leverage some of our off-peak hours to help do prescription processing.”

New Challenges

Now as chief pharmacy officer, Smith oversees the hospital inpatient pharmacy and operations, the clinical pharmacy services that encompass both the acute care space and the clinical pharmacist specialists, such as those who work with oncologists or critical care providers. He reports to Kathy Parrinello, R.N., Ph.D., who is president and CEO of Strong Memorial Hospital.

Smith said one of the biggest challenges he has faced is keeping up with possible changes because of the new administration. “It seems like every day there’s a new executive order,” he said. “The biggest challenge is trying to keep track of all this and what these changes all mean. How does that impact our organization? What's real? What's a smoke screen”?

Smith and his team are keeping an eye on how tariffs might impact the hospital system. “I would say this is a fluid situation,” he said. “In the pharmaceutical industry, I think a lot of it depends on two things: where the active product ingredient is actually sourced and made, and where the drug is actually put together and then sold into the United States.”

Any tariffs, he said, would likely have an impact on the hospital system’s supply chain down the road. “In the generic market, especially, that [tariffs] could impact drug shortages,” he said. “But that’s just the nature of the business. We're always going to need to manage shortages in the ambulatory space.