In Memory of Kevin Clauson - A Leader in the Pharmacy Tech Space
With great sorrow, I learned that Kevin Clauson, PharmD, had passed away this past week.
For those that did not directly know Kevin have been affected by his work and passion in the profession. Many informatics pharmacists and those interested in tech follow in Kevin's footsteps. His work was important and seminal in establishing key concepts we can build upon. What made this work even rarer is the kindness that extended this work into opportunities for others. Beyond the pioneering ground broken by his work, Kevin’s impact will continue to resonate through the introductions he fostered over decades. His colleagues and collaborators will carry on. While my work in Digital Health diverged from his path years ago, our passions and outlook did not. I will truly miss his mentorship and guidance. I hope to emulate his kindness, goofiness, and gentle behavior in some ways with those that I come to mentor in the future.
Kevin has, for over a decade, been a great mentor for me. He helped give me great insight into his work and knowledge early in my career, which helped me establish myself in this profession. And in that spirit, I wish to share what he meant to me and what he has done for the pharmacy profession, lest that knowledge is lost.
What I found most surprising about Kevin when we first talked was that he did not start off in tech, despite that being his main professional interest area and pursuit. Kevin completed his PharmD at the turn of the millennium, on the cusp of the rise and adoption of the world wide web and the economic downturn of the tech bubble. He then went to Kansas, where he would be a Natural Product Research Fellow. Many of his early academic writings and publications focused on natural products, exploring the clinical evidence for using supplements and herbal medicines. During his fellowship, he taught students about drug information and evidence-based medicine.
When Kevin then took his role as assistant professor of pharmacy practice at Nova Southeastern University (NSU), he brought his interests with him. He continued to teach about drug information and dietary supplements. But over time, I think his interest in establishing and searching for medical information morphed. Around this time, we saw the takeoff of online social media, video sharing, and crowd-sourced information. He started to teach about drug information resources and technology to achieve better literature evaluation and integrate those concepts for future pharmacists. By the 2010s, he was teaching about consumer health informatics and Web 2.0 and coordinating drug information and health informatics.
His research also shifted towards this area of information. It was in the mid-2000s that Kevin really started to gravitate towards the mobile health (mHealth) field. He was looking at how eHealth was changing healthcare. I feel that his experience in researching CAM, herbals, and supplements gravitated him towards a niche consumer outlook on healthcare. How do people find information? How do they use that information? In the 2000s, it was by going on the computer, or for some, a Blackberry or PDA device. He even published and spoke about the use of early mobile tools as a resource for clinical insights. But then the iPhone came out in 2006, and we started seeing the movement towards the mHealth space
Kevin would continue to research, investigate, and teach about the role of mobile technology in different facets. He investigated the medical accuracy of Wikipedia, looked into what apps were useful for healthcare professionals and pharmacists, tackled the role of informatics, and helped champion the developing roles spreading into health systems with EHR adoptions. He published this, spoke on it, and showed a tremendous passion. If anyone asks about the early days of the internet and its impact on patient care and pharmacy, I would look back at Clauson et al. to see who the early pioneers were.
But I never heard of Kevin Clauson or met him until after I finished pharmacy school and did a residency and fellowship. Around that time, I had started to develop an interest in mobile apps and started writing for iMedicalapps where I was helping to review health consumer and pharmacy-focused mobile apps. Little did I know, Kevin was doing the same thing. By 2012, I connected with Kevin to learn more about him, his history, and his thoughts (something he would always do, across all different groups, whether pharmacy students, clinicians, or industry leaders).
I'm glad I did. Keven was a wealth of information. By this point, he had launched and was the director of NSU's Center for Consumer Health Informatics (CCHIR), and it had been designated as a World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Center. Kevin would go on to do more with the WHO on mHealth and digital health. He is one of the only pharmacists I know of that served as a thought leader on tech for that organization.
Kevin took me on as a mentee. We shared many interests. I told him I was writing a paper on mobile apps for pharmacists using mobile devices. He laughed. He did the same almost a decade ago after his fellowship, but for the PDA. I told him I wanted to present at Midyear on apps for pharmacists and get future learners to think about how to integrate mobile devices into clinical practice. He had done the same several years previously, but he helped share his work and previous publications and presentations to give me a starting point and not 'reinvent' the wheel.
In many ways, Kevin had done a lot of the work before. The technology was changing, the devices and hardware were getting smaller, and the internet was faster. But the concept of using mHealth was the same.
Kevin started tossing things my way. I think he was trying to help me get on my own two feet at the time. As a new faculty member with an area of interest that wasn't exactly defined and no other mentorship available, I latched on. He helped me get publications and presentations and fashioned my ideas. I started making new decks and concepts and sharing them with him. At one point, I felt I was tackling the northeast and him the southeast of the US with our pursuit of mHealth across pharmacy.
But Kevin was moving on to bigger things. By 2015, Kevin had left NSU and CCHIR for Lipscomb University. I remember having conversations around that time about why he was moving and what he wanted to do. I was very excited for him. I felt he was going to pioneer the academic and pharmaceutical side of blockchain and healthcare. Web3 is a huge topic right now, but Kevin was exploring it even before the term NFT and before the first Bitcoin surge happened. I truly believe that Kevin was setting up the next movement towards a data stream that would have multiple levels of impact across healthcare, and he wanted to prep the pharmacy profession and future students for the inevitable. Evolving from consumer health informatics and health informatics overall to this space, I feel was a natural fit for him.
I think this alone warrants recognition for his work. His research and interests were multivariate, across numerous stakeholders, with a high interest in the integrity of academic pursuits and building for future learners. His focus areas covered:
mHealth and Digital Health
Natural health products (I loved that he looked into cognitive performance enhancements for poker)
Social media (both consumer-facing and its role in professional identity)
Participatory medicine
Informatics and its role in pharmacy education
Blockchain
But, aside from just his scholarly and academic pursuits, Kevin was a leader in many untraditional ways. Kevin was often the only pharmacist at the table. For a profession currently mired in determining its future and what technology may pose for our identity, Kevin had been trying to get a place at the table well before many thought to consider it.
He was involved with the Society of Participatory Medicine, on the editorial board of Frontiers in Blockchain and Blockchain in Healthcare Today, HIMSS conference planning, was a member of the WHO Department of Digital Health experts, and served on the scientific advisory panel at Standford Medicine X. He was the only pharmacist to do many of these things, and he had great interest in considering the role of the pharmacist in new sectors that others may not have considered including our voice in. He was even part of the White House precision medicine initiative as part of MedX, and was the only pharmacist present (I believe). His advocacy for our profession was important, and he was a true networker.
His loss will be a void that will be noticed, and I cannot state enough how much his outlook was needed during these times of advancement.
Kevin always supported my work in mHealth/Digital Health. He invited me to many events, got me involved, and connected me with others in and outside of pharmacy. He opened many doors for me that I do not think I could have achieved so quickly. And yet he treated me as a colleague and not just a mentee.
Two years ago, Kevin asked me to support his promotion from the rank of associate to full professor. I want to share some of my views of why he warranted that rank (if not obvious at this point):
I have known Kevin since 2011, when we became introduced due to our aligned interests in the mobile health (mHealth) space, which has evolved into the current digital health era. At that time, I was a PGY-1 resident at a health system but had started investigating the use of iPads and associated mobile devices and apps for use in workflow and patient care. This turned into formal blogging and medical writing, where Kevin had done tremendous work already, and as such, he served as an early mentor while he was at Nova South Eastern and was in the process of starting his work with the WHO. Kevin helped introduce me to many different subsets of the nascent digital health space, as I feel he recognized that there were not many pharmacists active in the space and wanted to help create awareness and saw a semi-kindred interest. Not to be superfluous, but this was tremendous to my personal growth, and I feel that Kevin's early mentorship was responsible for my own work that now influences the current digital health space. In many ways, my expertise is hinged on this, and I recognize the role Kevin has played in his mentorship for others to broaden awareness of digital health in our profession.
I can point to several projects that Kevin and myself collaborated upon, including publications and reviewing each other's presentations over the years that have been implicit to the digital health space. This includes the role of digital health in health education, digital health for pharmacy, and the evaluation of mobile medical apps for medical utilization. Nonetheless, Kevin has been highly productive in the scholarship of tying together pharmacy and informatics and education, with many accomplishments, such as his role at the WHO Collaborating Center prior to moving to Lipscomb. He has a stellar scholarly production with over 70 publications and multiple podium presentations that I have heard over the years that tend to captivate the audience. This is especially the case in conferences and venues where he is the only pharmacist speaking and can give a professional viewpoint often missed in such circles. I could point out his work with MedX with Stanford as an obvious example, where I would argue he helped open the doors for other pharmacists to become involved over the years. His work has been focused on many mainstream media ranging from the NYT to the WSJ and other large radio stations. One area that I think Kevin is shining a light upon is the role of informatics and blockchain as a serious endeavor. Yes, bitcoin and other related financial topics are often the matter most regard when thinking blockchain, but the health implications are quite enormous as well. Kevin is leading a serious initiative from a pharmacy standpoint that I have yet to see anyone else accomplish and is making his region and Lipscomb University a serious hub for this work.
In essence, Kevin stands as one of the hallmarks of early innovators in a subset of medical expertise that has broadened in importance most recently. While he may have been an early adoptor in the early 2000s on the importance mobile devices like a PDA would have on health care practitioners and the value of the internet for patient consumer access, his pharmacy background enabled him to bring this to light for our profession. His work over the years, mentorship of pharmacists, and his vast amount of untraditional service have been key to fostering what I believe to now be a renaissance period in what health care will be going forward this century. We have seen the pandemic upend the health sector with a movement towards mobile technology, telehealth, and the use of other novel technology that Kevin has been propositioning as the future of patient care for over a decade now. His work and passion have set the foundation for many pharmacists like myself that are now endeavoring to find a pharmacy role in the future. As such, I believe that this work and what he has done positions him to be an important figure in our profession and to deserve a professor's rank.
It's been difficult to process the passing of Kevin. In many ways, I hope this piece may serve those who look back on how pharmacy and technology become intertwined. Many of us have been influenced by his work in pharmacy tech and will continue to carry on the projects he led and collaborated upon or will be influenced by what he has done. I look to my role to keep pushing for the integration of the digitalization of health care within the pharmacy profession based on his mentorship.
But I will miss you, Kevin, so very much. Thank you for all you have done.
Please keep his family in your hearts, including his wife Angela, daughter Ella, and his colleagues across many different parts of the world.
If you want to learn more about Kevin’s work and interests, I recommend visiting his blog, Unnatural Language Processing, his publications, and some of his public presentations and videos.
I want to thank Beth, Ravi, Beju, Tony, Matt, Ray and many others that have known Kevin for their input on this piece.