Nisha Bhide, Pharm.D. | 2024 Emerging Leaders In Healthcare

Nisha Bhide, Pharm.D.

I grew up in East Brunswick, New Jersey, and went to Rutgers University for pharmacy school, where I ,received my doctor of pharmacy degree. I learned the value of hard work, dedication and grit from my entrepreneurial parents, who motivated me to continue training through residency and fellowship. I was the first postgraduate year (PGY) 2 corporate health-system pharmacy administration resident and the first executive pharmacy leadership and supply chain management fellow at Ascension/The Resource Group. The exposure and learning from those two years set me up for every opportunity I have had since.

As director of formulary operations and the PGY1 managed care residency program director, I built the formulary operations team from the ground up to serve all lines of business, including commercial, health insurance marketplaces, Medicaid and Medicare, and supported the company’s state-of-the-art claim adjudication platform. I serve in multiple local, regional and national committees and positions, including the US Pharmacopeia healthcare safety and quality
expert committee.

Please describe a turning point in your career — an event, a eureka moment, an encounter or a salient piece of advice from someone.

Most of my career has been steadily built upon experiences and opportunities. I found confidence in myself when I created my first pharmacist role as Ascension senior manager of pharmacy deployment following residency and fellowship training. I was able to take all the learning and experiences from pharmacy school and postdoc training and apply it in a professional setting. From leading mergers and hospital acquisitions to operationalizing Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education-accredited continuing education to supporting over 120 health system clinical and operational initiatives, I came into my own as a healthcare and pharmacy leader and had the support of my mentors and leaders.

What are your top two priorities as a leader in your organization and in helathcare?

As a leader in healthcare, I continue to prioritize staying on top of the always-changing healthcare landscape as well as pipeline medication approvals and changes. Additionally, I prioritize developing future pharmacy leaders by leading Capital Rx’s advanced pharmacy practice experiences program with multiple schools of pharmacy and directing our PGY1 Managed Care
Residency Program.

If you could change one thing about U.S. healthcare, what would it be?

Much of healthcare is siloed and segmented, which can be confusing to both patients and healthcare teams. If I could change one thing, it would be integration of all health information, through perhaps unified healthcare claims processing, in one place for it to be available to those taking
care of patients.

Name a book or an article that everyone working in healthcare should read.

I recommend that everyone read the various articles KFF Health News publishes. KFF is an independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism, and it does a great job of explaining impactful and complicated health policy issues in a clear and understandable way.

How do you strike the right work-life balance?

It is always tough to strike the right work-life balance, especially early in one’s career, when you do not want to give up an exciting learning or growth opportunity. I strive every day to utilize my personal and work calendars to prioritize items and due dates, delegate when possible and disconnect completely to be fully present at home with family when away from the computer.

If you could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, who would it be and why?

I wish I could have dinner with myself when I was around 23 years old to help that version of myself see the many possibilities the future holds and how to be excited about them. Otherwise, I would have dinner with Warren Buffett because he explains things in graspable ways that everyone can understand, he thinks in a methodical way and has amassed success.