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Student Profile: Olga Mostovestky

It could be easy to assume that the relationship between pharmacists and physicians as a one-way street: The physician orders a prescription and the pharmacist then fills it. But in reality, information flows in both directions, for pharmacists are often very involved in helping physicians better understand the drugs they prescribe to their patients. Partners in D is seeding this interprofessional collaboration, while health professional students are still in school, through the highly polished work of student pharmacists who are teaching their peers in medical and nursing schools about Medicare Part D. In fact, their audiences have grown to include licensed physicians and others.

Olga Mostovestky, a student pharmacist at the UCSF School of Pharmacy is one of those students. Her role is to help tomorrow's doctors and nurses understand Part D well enough to make sure that their patients have access to the medications they need, rather than a prescription they cannot afford to fill.

"I literally got involved in Partners in D during my first few minutes in pharmacy school," says Olga. "Shortly after beginning school, I attended a lecture about Medicare Part D. It was the year the benefit came out for the first time. I felt it was my responsibility to learn about it as a health care provider."

That was back in 2005, when Medicare Part D was brand new and nobody knew how, or whether, it would work.

"When my professor started talking about the actual structure of Medicare Part D, I got lost," says Olga. "I knew it was important, and that it was confusing. I could only imagine how patients would feel. After four years, I feel I still have more to learn about Medicare Part D."

Initially, Olga went through a special training to prepare her to provide one-on-one counseling to underserved seniors at outreach events in the San Francisco Bay Area. Today she is using the knowledge she gained helping seniors "in the trenches" to inform the presentations she now gives to students at medical and nursing schools.

"Having firsthand experience of the difficulties seniors face in picking the right Part D plan each year has helped me and my fellow pharmacy students better communicate these challenges to med students and nursing students," says Olga. "When they see that we understand Part D and can help them understand their patient's situation, they really start to pay attention."

Olga is part of a Partners in D peer-to-peer teaching corps that lectures to health professional students--and increasingly to licensed physicians and others--where they study or practice. At the end of the group lecture, the student pharmacists ask participants to complete a short survey, which is used to improve future presentations.

Sometimes additional feedback comes much later.

"Several months after we gave a peer education presentation to a group of UCSF med students, I was working in a hospital and saw some familiar faces," says Olga. "Three med students on their rotations came up to me and said that they had learned so much from our presentation. That felt great."

By participating in peer-to-peer education through Partners in D, Olga is not simply helping future healthcare professionals understand Medicare Part D. She is also helping to raise the profile of her whole profession.

"After our presentations, some people have said they didn't know pharmacists could be so articulate! This definitely feels like one of the most important things I've done in pharmacy school, for sure."

Olga, who is originally from Ukraine, moved to New York when she was 14.

"I don't have any doctors in my family. But I always liked science," says Olga. "I didn't want to work in a hospital. And I didn't want to work in a lab. So pharmacy seemed like a good fit."

After completing her undergraduate degree at Cornell University, Olga worked in a research laboratory at Rockefeller University, where she started looking into pharmacy schools.

"What I liked about pharmacy as a profession was that it gave me a lot of different options," says Olga. "But that's making it difficult for me to chose right now. I don't have a concrete plan for what I'm going to do after I graduate. But I think that all the experience I have with Part D could be useful in the community. A lot of community pharmacists don't really understand how Part D works. I want to change that a little bit."

While peer-to-peer teaching began at the UCSF School of Pharmacy as part of the statewide Partners in D program, the other 6 Partners in D schools in California are gearing up to launch the initiative in their greater communities.