2025 Steven G. Avey Recipient - John Watkins, PharmD, MPH, BCPS

John Watkins, PharmD, MPH, BCPS
Celebrate his accomplishments and join the
Steven G. Avey Host Committee in his honor.

John Watkins graduated from University of Washington. He completed a combined MPH degree in Pharmacy and Health Services at University of Washington with a residency at Group Health Cooperative, where he worked as a clinical and drug information pharmacist. He is board certified in pharmacotherapy.

John is Residency Program Director at Premera Blue Cross, where he created the organization's formulary process and managed it from 2000-2021. During this time, he led Premera’s Biotechnology and Value-based Formulary projects. His responsibilities included health technology assessment, formulary process development, formulary reviews, clinical guidelines development and medical policy review. He also provides drug information support to medical and case management staff. 

He is Affiliate Professor of Pharmacy at the University of Washington, where he teaches managed care pharmacy and medical literature evaluation methods, and is an advisor to the UW AMCP student chapter. His areas of interest include health policy, health technology assessment and application of evidence-based medicine, economics and ethics to formulary and coverage decision making processes. 

John is a member of the ISPOR North American HTA Roundtable and the Patient Roundtable. He served on the ISPOR Board of Directors 2016-18 and was a member of the AMCP Format Executive Committee for 15 years. 

Before coming to Premera, John was an Associate Pharmacy Director at Regence BlueShield and a clinical pharmacist at Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound. He has also worked as a community pharmacist and served as a hospital pharmacy director, medical supplies director and pharmacology instructor for 7 years in Kathmandu, Nepal.

John’s interest in formulary systems goes back to Nepal, where he established the first formal P&T committee and developed a combined formulary and drug procurement system serving 30 projects under two separate NGOs. It was there that he first became interested in the problem of managing scarce resources to maximize the value of pharmacotherapy at the patient level.