Intern Alum Spotlight: Kenny Correia
Originally published in the Q1 2019 AMCP Foundation e-newsletter.
Over the past 26 years, nearly 200 student pharmacists have taken part in AMCP Foundation summer internship programs. We are proud of each and every one of these individuals, as many have gone onto remarkable careers in managed care pharmacy and elsewhere. We’re pleased to highlight our intern alumni in this new spotlight feature.
Our first intern alumni spotlight is Kenny Correia, PharmD, BCACP, CDOE, CVDOE, who served as a 2008 AMCP Foundation/Pfizer, Inc. Managed Care Summer Intern at Independent Health. Correia is now a Board Certified Ambulatory Care Pharmacist at Anchor Medical Associates, a patient centered medical home (PHMH) in Providence, Rhode Island. In his work, Correia runs a team of pharmacists and technicians at PHMH who help support primary care doctors in providing high quality care for patients. Working in a collaborative relationship, Correia’s team provides medication therapy management to help patients optimize their medications by actively managing drug therapy and by identifying, preventing and resolving medication-related problems. In addition, Correia is President-Elect of the Rhode Island Pharmacists Association.
What does a typical day look like?
There is no “typical” day for our team. We support and consult on a variety of topics from medication safety, medication optimization and spend our time split between direct-patient care (~75% of time) and admin/workflow based interventions (~25% of time).
What types of managed care practices do you use in your work?
Understanding formulary management and the in/out of commercial vs. Medicaid vs. Medicare coverage has been essential to helping our patients and providers with medication optimization. By helping to navigate the system, we have been able to find and address barriers to care for our population that has significantly improved quality scores, while decreasing cost of care for our patients.
How did the Foundation Internship prepare you for your career?
The AMCP Foundation summer internship helped me to understand the complex nature of the managed care world. By understanding the “why” it has helped me provide better care in my AmCare clinic.
Anything else you’d like to add?
The work I did during the Summer Internship program directly helped secure my current position. The work I did with Independent Health on an opiate alert database and provider letter writing campaign back in 2008 (before most other plans started to take action) taught me IT/ data management skills I skill use every day when I am working on population level approaches to improvement in care. My current employer was impressed with the skills I learned during the internship and it helped me to “beat out” the other candidates for the position.