Meet the Pharmacy Practice + Business Award winner for Rising Star Molly Yang: Filling gaps and making an impact in vaccine care
Molly Yang is chief innovation officer (CIO) at VaxCare Innovations, a non-profit organization, formed to develop innovative solutions for healthcare professionals to enhance vaccine education and uptake across communities. She is also director of Pharmacy Innovation and Professional Affairs for Wholehealth Pharmacy Partners, a national pharmacy banner with more than 240 stores across Canada.
Why she won
In less than five years after graduating from the University of Toronto’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, Molly Yang has already proven her penchant for leadership and community impact. On top of developing innovative pharmacy programs in her full-time role at Wholehealth, she has been a key investigator for several practice-based research studies that examine pharmacists’ roles with vaccines. In her role at VaxCare she continues to leverage her knowledge and experience with emerging technology and AI to optimize tools for pharmacists and other healthcare providers.
As co-primary investigator on the VaxCheck project, Yang led development of the training and tools that pharmacists used to identify vaccination needs for their patients. Throughout the study, pharmacists identified more than 370 vaccination gaps in 123 patients, highlighting the opportunity for pharmacy to protect communities against vaccine-preventable diseases. These results and qualitative findings will continue to inform VaxCare Innovations and future research.
This past year, Yang established the Dose4Dose campaign at Wholehealth, to donate childhood vaccines worldwide through UNICEF, resulting in the donation of more than 10,000 essential childhood vaccines to vulnerable children around the world. She also led the development of central prescribing models at Wholehealth, creating solutions and partnerships with the aim of improving access to prescriptions for Schedule II vaccines in Ontario.
Yang was also selected for the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Advisory Group at the Ontario College of Pharmacy and draws on her experience with multiple marginalized identities to advise the College on future EDI initiatives.
- Q&A with Molly Yang
What do you enjoy the most about what you do?
My day-to-day projects can be very different, and the variety and freedom are things I value. I enjoy challenging myself and the feeling of overcoming discomfort in new and unfamiliar tasks or places. I love meeting and brainstorming with creative thinkers or people who bring different perspectives and experiences, ultimately working with the goal of making a difference in pharmacy and patient care.
What is your biggest challenge?
Realistically, work-life balance. Sometimes I fear falling behind on personal milestones, but I try to remember that everyone's path is different. It has been helpful to share and connect with others about this, particularly women, who often experience different needs and expectations. As long as I am working on projects that are important to me, I don't feel like I'm missing out.
Is there someone in particular who mentored you, or served as a role model?
I started as a student at Wholehealth in 2019, and throughout the years I have been fortunate to work closely with Dean Miller, who has defined for me what a leader should be, and James Morrison, who inspires me with his deep passion for pharmacy and advocacy. Of course there are also all the amazing pharmacists, colleagues and students who I learn from daily. With VaxCare, I have been fortunate to partner with Nancy Waite and Sherilyn Houle, whom I also look up to as researchers, educators and leaders in pharmacy.
What’s your favourite way to spend time outside of work?
I love to travel for offshore snorkeling, but at home I decompress with yoga or creative projects. I made an Instagram for my cats last year for fun and surprisingly, a few videos went viral, so now I spend an hour a week filming cat videos as well.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give a young pharmacist who wants to make a difference?
Identify and share what you are passionate about, then reach out to mentors, potential collaborators and peers. You never know what opportunities exist until you ask for them. You have the ability to do anything you want to with your career, you just have to be willing to take the initiative and connect in a meaningful way.
Name something you’re really good at that has nothing to do with pharmacy.
I have always been an artist and I love painting and digital mediums. I went to art school and credit that for building problem-solving skills. With limited resources in a public art school, projects often didn’t develop exactly as I’d envisioned, so planning, pivoting quickly, and finding creative solutions were a challenging but fun part of the process.
What’s next for you?
I always want to continue developing innovative projects to support patient care. I would also like to own pharmacies in the next couple of years to implement the initiatives we build at Wholehealth first-hand. Being more involved with technology is a personal interest and goal of mine, and VaxCare is allowing me to explore that with building our VaxCheck tool.
