Consumerism in health care isn’t coming; it’s already here. Patients are making more choices, acting faster, and accessing more information than ever before. They compare options. They look for convenience. They weigh costs. They decide what “value” means, often before they ever meet with a clinician.

Attending my first meeting of the Joint Commission of Pharmacy Practitioners (JCPP) in January left me both energized and unsettled, in a good way. Energized, because the discussion made clear that consumerism is no longer a buzzword. The forces accelerating this movement are now familiar to all of us: patient portals, telehealth, home diagnostics, remote monitoring, and increasingly, digital tools that promise to “simplify” care but can just as easily create confusion. Both the professional and the lay literature captures this shift well. Patients are gaining autonomy and access to information at an unprecedented speed, but pharmacists still lack standardized, systematic ways to help patients make informed decisions, and equity and access remain real threats.¹ Unsettled, because JCPP speakers kept returning to a deceptively simple message: If we want the public to understand the value of pharmacists, we must translate our work into what consumers care about the most: preventing harm. Not “optimizing therapy.” Not even “improving outcomes” (though we do). The message that lands with patients is clearer and more urgent: A pharmacist helps keep you safe.

We should be honest about another reality: published work continues to suggest that public understanding of pharmacists’ clinical roles remains uneven. For example, consumer perception research in community pharmacy settings underscores the public’s limited understanding of what pharmacists do. And what patients demand does not always match the full scope of clinical pharmacist expertise and impact.² In a consumer-driven environment, we cannot assume people understand our clinical value unless we make it visible. Visibility becomes part of our work.

Consumerism Reframes the Value Conversation

In professional circles, we talk comfortably about medication optimization, comprehensive medication management, and clinical outcomes. However, consumers experience health care differently. They experience risk, confusion, and fragmented care—and too often, preventable medication-related harm.

From a consumer perspective, the most compelling value proposition is not a detailed description of responsibilities. It is safety. It is trust. It is the reassurance that someone is watching closely when therapies are complex, involve high risk, or are evolving quickly. Yet much of what pharmacists do to prevent harm remains invisible. When we succeed, nothing happens—there’s no adverse event, no crisis, no dramatic moment. The patient simply avoids harm. But in a consumer-driven world, this invisibility is a barrier. If the public cannot see our role, they are less likely to ask for us, expect us to be involved in their care, advocate for models that embed clinical pharmacists in clinical practice, or pay for our service.

When Advocacy Moves Beyond Policy: What the ACCP Emergency Medicine PRN Is Modeling

One of the strongest examples I’ve seen of “making the invisible visible” comes from ACCP’s Emergency Medicine Practice and Research Network. Their 2025 paper, “The Missing Piece in The Pitt: A Call for Emergency Medicine Pharmacist Representation,”³ was intentionally published in an emergency medicine journal rather than a pharmacy journal and intentionally included a key emergency medicine physician advocate. This decision was not incidental; it was strategic. If the goal is to influence how clinical pharmacists are understood and whether they are expected to be present on care teams, the message must reach beyond our profession.

The paper itself is masterful in tone and approach. It praises The Pitt for its authenticity while making a clear case that an essential member of modern emergency care teams is missing: the emergency medicine clinical pharmacist. It explains, in plain terms, how clinical pharmacists in the ED prevent medication errors before they reach patients by intercepting unsafe doses, incorrect routes, high-risk interactions, and other preventable harms when seconds matter.

What I appreciated most is that the authors did not frame clinical pharmacist inclusion as “nice to have.” They framed it as realism. In the real world, emergency medicine clinical pharmacists elevate team performance and patient safety. And in the world of storytelling, they argued, involvement of clinical pharmacists enhances the narrative. Indeed, when clinical decisions must be made under pressure and involve high-stakes medication choices, rapid interdisciplinary collaboration is exactly what audiences expect from an emergency medicine drama. But what impressed me most in speaking with authors Brian Gilbert and Kevin Mercer is that they did not treat the publication of their piece as the finish line. They treated it as the starting point.

A Living Advocacy Campaign and What Other PRNs Can Learn

Brian and Kevin described an effort that has become a living advocacy campaign, one built on persistence, creativity, and coalition building. Their goal isn’t simply to “get a clinical pharmacist on a show.” It’s bigger: to normalize the idea that clinical pharmacists belong at the bedside as part of emergency care and to help the public understand what pharmacist clinicians actually do when medication decisions are made under pressure. The authors have taken action across multiple fronts:

• Coalition building beyond pharmacy. They are actively growing a coalition of emergency physicians and other health professionals who recognize that public portrayals of emergency care often underrepresent essential team members. Coalitions matter because they change the narrative faster than a single profession advocating alone.
• Engagement with media creators. They have pursued efforts to connect with writers and producers, recognizing how difficult it can be to break into this world, yet choosing to step into it anyway. Their reasoning is straightforward: if clinical pharmacists are not visible, creators won’t think to consult them, and if creators don’t consult them, they will remain absent.
• Amplification through public channels. They have used social media intentionally to extend the conversation and have seen signs that the message can travel beyond the pharmacy profession. They describe engagement that includes social media blasts, posts shared across networks, and even Reddit discussions, including some initiated by non-pharmacists. This is the signal we should be watching for: when the public begins to carry the message without being asked.
• National emergency medicine visibility. Momentum was accelerated further through a widely shared clip associated with the American College of Emergency Physicians. In this interview, Noah Wyle, star of The Pitt, explicitly acknowledges that the show has been underrepresenting pharmacists (together with respiratory therapists and physician assistants) and that the issue has been addressed.⁴ This matters—not because it flatters us, but because it illustrates a principle: visibility gaps can be closed when advocacy is sustained, specific, and collaborative.
• Building infrastructure for long-term visibility. To sustain the effort, they took another step many of us have never considered: registering with Hollywood, Health & Society, a University of Southern California–affiliated hub that connects entertainment writers with medical consultants.⁵ Their observation that pharmacists appear to be rare in this consultant pool reveals both a concern and an opportunity. If we want to be portrayed accurately and want the public to recognize our role, we must be present in the places where narratives are shaped. Looking ahead, Heather Blue (a past chair of the PRN) is leading a next-phase effort to assess emergency medicine pharmacist representation in the media and identify actionable opportunities to improve accuracy and visibility.

Of importance, their approach has been collaborative, not critical. They’ve acknowledged the strengths of The Pitt while inviting the writers to make it even more authentic. They’ve framed pharmacist representation not as a complaint, but as an improvement: better realism, better education for audiences, and better alignment with how emergency medicine actually functions.

Why This Matters Far Beyond Emergency Medicine

This is bigger than one television show and one PRN. The Emergency Medicine PRN is modeling a modern form of advocacy that treats consumers as stakeholders who shape expectations and ultimately system design.

Plainly put: Patients won’t ask for what they don’t know exists.

In high-risk environments like the ED, clinical pharmacists prevent catastrophic medication-related harm every day—errors that never make the headlines because they were avoided. This is the paradox: our greatest value is often the harm that never happens. However, consumerism changes the stakes. If consumers don’t understand our role, they are less likely to demand clinical pharmacist involvement, support pharmacist-funded models, or expect team-based care that includes medication safety expertise. Visibility, when done well, is not self-promotion. It is building an infrastructure to establish trust. And when our core promise is harm prevention, trust is not optional; it is the pathway to impact.

A Challenge to ACCP Members and PRNs

Policy engagement, reimbursement reform, and regulatory work remain essential. But in a consumer-driven era, public understanding is a parallel pathway to change, and we can act on it now. I encourage ACCP members and PRNs to consider 3 practical steps:

• Define your harm prevention headline. If you had 1 sentence a consumer could repeat, what would it be? Keep it concrete and human: “A pharmacist helps prevent life-threatening medication harm and keeps you safe.”
• Choose 1 channel outside pharmacy. A physician-facing journal. A community forum. A patient advocacy partnership. A local news story. A podcast. A media consultation network. Pick 1 channel that consumers or other clinicians access and commit to learning how it works.
• Build a coalition that makes your message harder to ignore. Consumers trust teams. When physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, and pharmacists align around safety, the story becomes “what good care requires,” not “what one profession wants.” If we want patients to walk into an ED and say, “Where’s the clinical pharmacist?”, we must first help them understand why this question matters.

The future of clinical pharmacy will be shaped not only by what we do, but also by whether the patients we serve can clearly see it.

References

1. DiPiro JT, Couldry R, Dopp AL, et al. ASHP and ASHP Foundation Pharmacy Forecast 2026: strategic planning guidance for pharmacy departments in hospitals and health systems. Am J Health Syst Pharm. 2026;83(2):71-101. https://doi.org/10.1093/ajhp/zxaf247

2. Xuan YW, Goh HP, Rehman IU, et al. Assessing consumers’ perception and demand on the community pharmacists’ dispensing. J Pharm Policy Pract. 2023;16(1):162. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40545-023-00609-1

3. Mercer KJ, Gilbert BW, Robertson A, Blue H, Kroll CE, Bellolio F. The missing piece in The Pitt: a call for emergency medicine pharmacist representation. Am J Emerg Med. 2025;96:291-292. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajem.2025.08.037

4. ACEP interview with Noah Wyle at ACEP25. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F2FuXvAG7Y

5. Hollywood, Health & Society. Accessed February 2, 2026. https://hollywoodhealthandsociety.org