Pharmacists at the Center: Managing REMS Education, Compliance, and Collaboration Across Care Settings

In 'Pharmacists at the Center: Managing REMS Education, Compliance, and Collaboration Across Care Settings,' our panel of experts delve into the following critical question:

Pharmacists are the primary coordinators for REMS education, compliance, and cross-team communication. What does that role look like in practice and how do you scale it?

Led by the moderator, the panelists examined the central and multifaceted role pharmacists play in REMS coordination across both academic and large-scale community oncology settings, describing how their institutions have built structured systems to ensure that every provider, nurse, and support staff member who may encounter a patient on a bispecific antibody is educated, enrolled, and operationally ready before a program goes live. The panelists discussed REMS education initiatives at their practices and also emphasized that REMS coordination in large multi-site community practices requires deliberate infrastructure investment, particularly when pharmacists are not physically present at every infusion location, making centralized program management, rotating area pharmacist coverage, and comprehensive cross-coverage provider enrollment essential safeguards for ensuring that the right person can always sign an order regardless of which provider is covering on a given day.

Throughout the conversation, the experts provide a comprehensive reflection on the field and the factors that may shape how clinicians approach care moving forward.

In the next episode, 'Reducing Hospitalization Without Compromising Safety: Step-Up Dosing Criteria and Best Practices in Myeloma,' panelists will continue their discussion on multiple myeloma and highlight what should be driving inpatient versus outpatient step-up dosing decisions, how more experienced centers are moving away from package insert defaults toward real-world-evidence-based protocols, and the specific patient and disease characteristics that determine eligibility for outpatient administration at their institutions.