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United States Surgeon General Richard Carmona, M.D., left, with College of Pharmacy alumnus Timothy Stroup. |
Stroup was instrumental in establishing the first national Veterans Affairs Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacy (CMOP) Program, which he continues to serve as its director. The program streamlined the system into one that uses automated dispensing.
Previously, 172 VA Medical Centers nationwide mailed out prescriptions manually.
“With 172 centers doing their own mailings, there were differences in standards of how that was done,” Stroup said.
Stroup, a 1976 UNMC graduate, said he wanted to create a more efficient, patient-friendly way of getting prescriptions to veterans.
The way the program works is that after a prescription is initially filled locally, the patient is then provided with refill slips, which he or she then mails to CMOP for refills.
“The VA is the first entity to provide prescriptions by mail,” Stroup said. “In the 1950s, every VA medical center in the country began mailing out their own prescriptions.”
By the 1970s, several VA medical centers in Los Angeles consolidated their mailings, sending prescriptions to patients manually, Stroup said. But the process was cumbersome and time-consuming. In 1988, as chief of pharmacy at the VA Medical Center in Leavenworth, Kan., Stroup was determined to find a better way.
Modeling what the VA medical centers in Los Angeles had done, Stroup began a pilot program between the Leavenworth center and the one in Topeka, Kan.
In 1994, after several years of perfecting the program and coming up with space for an automated dispensing system, the first prescription was sent out.
Stroup, who was born in Holdrege, Neb., first became interested in a career in pharmacy in high school.
Stroup attended Centura High School in Cairo, Neb., and at the time was thinking about entering the Naval Academy in the footsteps of his father, who served in the Navy during WWII.
Stroup changed his mind about entering the Navy when he found out that recruiters had him pegged as a candidate to be an electrical engineer on a submarine because of his national rankings in mathematics and chemistry.
After graduating from high school in 1971, and upon the advice of his chemistry teacher, Stroup enrolled in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to study pre-pharmacy.
While at UNL, Stroup took a position at Lincoln General Hospital in the pharmacy. But it was not until after he did a rotation in the pharmacy at the VA Medical Center in Lincoln that Stroup become inspired for a career with the VA.
“Their focus is on patient care,” Stroup said. “That is important to me.”
After graduating in 1976 from the College of Pharmacy with a bachelor of science degree, Stroup worked as a staff pharmacist at VA hospitals in several locations, including Louisville, Ky., and Iowa City, Iowa, and finally as the chief of pharmacy in Fort Wayne, Ind.
Stroup said he learned a lot along the way, but he wanted to move closer to home when both his paternal and maternal grandfathers died in the same year.
“I looked for a vacancy and found a spot in Leavenworth, where I was selected as chief of pharmacy,” Stroup said. “It wasn’t my first choice but it’s been the best life choice I could have made.”
Today, Stroup is responsible for a national program that provides more than 80 million prescriptions annually and has more than 1,100 employees and annual expenditures exceeding $2.2 billion.
Stroup said the challenge of establishing the consolidated mail outpatient pharmacy program has been rewarding but now he looks toward the future and “mentoring those who will be the builders of tomorrow.”
Stroup lives in Leavenworth, Kan., with his wife of 28 years.