JoAnne Myhre

Her Story

JoAnne Myhre, B.A., CPhT, became a PTCB-certified pharmacy technician in 2001, received her Bachelor of Arts in Management from the College of St. Scholastica in 2005, and is currently working on completing an Organizational Leadership Graduate Certificate program offered by St. Catherine University. She has worked as a pharmacy technician in various practice settings over the past 30 years and spent the majority of her career in hospital practice as a Pharmacy Operations Manager.

Ms. Myhre is a previous Minnesota Society of Health-Systems Pharmacists Outstanding Technician of the Year and currently chairs the Pharmacy Technician Program Advisory Committee at St Paul College.

Ms. Myhre is currently involved with the Section of Inpatient Care Practitioners as a member of Section Advisory Group on Advancing Pharmacy Practice with Technicians.

Overview of Facility/Health System

Allina Health is dedicated to the prevention and treatment of illness and enhancing the greater health of individuals, families and communities throughout Minnesota and western Wisconsin. A not-for-profit health care system, Allina Health cares for patients from beginning to end-of-life through its 90+ clinics, 13 hospitals, 15 pharmacies, specialty care centers and specialty medical services that provide home care, senior transitions, hospice care, home oxygen and medical equipment, and emergency medical transportation services.

Significant Projects

Ms. Myhre’ s current role requires her to coordinate and oversee an effective, risk-based approach for mitigating diversion risks across the organization and provide organizational leaders with reliable information on risk exposures. She also continues to utilize her previous pharmacy operations experience by supporting the Pharmacy Operations Team in various projects such as the recent Automated Dispensing Cabinet conversion/expansion project where she helped facilitate appropriate user set-up and security roles, ensured cabinet settings as well as policy and procedures were accurate, created training material for the nearly 10,000 potential users, and helped to ensure that medication security continued to be front and center.

Initial Involvement in ASHP

“Being from Minnesota, which has a long and rich professional organization leadership tradition, it was a no brainer to get involved both locally and nationally. I was first introduced to ASHP back in 2001 and participated in the planning committee working on developing the 2002 Summer Meeting Management/Leadership Learning Community."

Advice for Someone New to Your Specialty Area

“Health Care is an ever-changing and challenging environment and you can quickly burn out so you need to have a way to manage and adjust course effectively. One of the most valuable and useful tools for me has been resiliency. “Resilience requires insight, independence, community, initiative, creativity, humor and a strong sense of morality.” (The Resilient Self by Steven and Sybil Wolin) To be successful you need to be able to work independently and as a part of a team. To overcome challenges you may need to be creative and have initiative to get the ball rolling. When you feel overwhelmed, sometimes humor is just what the doctor ordered and above all, it is important that we are able to follow “Our True North” as our current ASHP President discussed in her inaugural speech.”

Value of ASHP

“ASHP offers a community of experts in a wide variety of roles and practice settings that one would be amiss not to tap into. Pharmacy Technicians continue to play a critical role in supporting the advancement of pharmaceutical care and their skills, knowledge and competence are more important than ever. ASHP is an invaluable resource to network, collaborate and quite frankly learn from the best!”