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Steven Allison grew up in a small rural town in western Maryland, where the trees and deer outnumbered the people. However, neighbors weren’t the only scarce resource in his hometown. Healthcare was just as hard to find.
“My dad had diabetes and I remember driving over an hour each way to get to his dialysis appointments,” Allison reflects. “I think those experiences are part of what drew me to healthcare in the first place. I wanted to make sure people didn’t have to go through what I went through as a kid.”
After getting an undergraduate degree in biology and a doctorate in pharmacy, Allison went on to fulfill that goal. As a pharmacy resident at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Allison got exposed to the ins and outs of medication safety, policy, and pharmacy administration. At Vidant Medical Center, now ECU Health, which serves more than 1.4 million people in twenty-nine eastern North Carolina counties, he lived out his passion for improving patient outcomes through pharmacy informatics medication safety and performance improvement efforts.
In 2013, he brought his expertise to AdventHealth, one of the largest nonprofit Protestant healthcare providers in the US. Headquartered in Altamonte Springs, Florida, the organization has fifty-three hospital campuses and hundreds of care sites in nine states. As vice president of pharmacy for the Central Florida Division as well as Corporate Clinical, Allison oversees pharmacy operations, performance, and outcomes for eight hospitals and focuses on optimizing pharmacy services across the country.
“People are any organization’s greatest capital. I work hard to understand their needs, wants, and goals. I want us to be a preferred employer, not just because we pay you, but because of how you’re treated and how you’re valued.”
Steve Allison
As a leader who spent his career in large, academic medical centers, Allison brings a valuable perspective to the role.
“At an academic medical center, you have residents, attending, chiefs, chairs—there’s research. AdventHealth has a lot of academic programs, too, but at its roots, it’s a community hospital,” he says. “So, I brought that academic mindset and have made that work in a community hospital where there’s different physician structure, decision-making authority, and stakeholders.”
For the past decade, that perspective has allowed Allison to make a mark on AdventHealth’s pharmacy function in more ways than one. At AdventHealth East Orlando, he helped reconfigure the pharmacy team and shape their priorities around operational efficiency and patient experience. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he coordinated vaccine distribution for Central Florida. He also got a chance to lead through a systemwide electronic medical record system (EMR) implementation, to enhance the pharmacy residency program, and to spearhead cost-saving initiatives.
While he looks back fondly on those strides, Allison is especially proud of the work he and his colleagues have done to make the pharmacy team more patient-facing. Part of that process has seen pharmacists participate in new approaches to transition-of-care, including involvement in the admission and discharge process.
“All of our new patients are expected to have their home medications reviewed by our pharmacy team to make sure nothing is missed,” says Allison. “Patients come in with a lot of meds, and some of them might be the reason that they are here today, some doses may need to be changed. Others might be medications that patients stopped taking a long time ago but are still on their list. We want to make sure they’re on exactly what they need.”
The discharge process has also seen an overhaul. Pharmacists work closely with patients who are at a high risk of being readmitted. They ensure the individuals not only have clear discharge instructions, but also are on the medications they need. These efforts are to help patients through an often challenging process, Allison says.
As a leader, Allison focuses on creating a work environment that employees want to stay in. Judging from his team’s single-digit turnover rates, his efforts are working.
“People are any organization’s greatest capital. I work hard to understand their needs, wants, and goals. I want us to be a preferred employer, not just because we pay you, but because of how you’re treated and how you’re valued,” Allison emphasizes. “If you create an environment for people to share what’s on their mind, for them to be connected to the mission, to be treated well and respected, they make the decision to stay.”
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