John developed and managed the formulary process at Premera Blue Cross from 2000-2020. He founded and served as Director of Premera’s PGY1 Managed Care Pharmacy Residency program, which began in 2017 in partnership with the AMCP Foundation, and the Institute for Clinical and Economic Research (ICER). His academic areas of interest include formulary development, health policy, health technology assessment, and applying evidence-based medicine, personalized medicine, economics, and bioethics to drive coverage decisions that support affordable health care.

In addition to teaching and advising managed care pharmacy students, he works as a freelance writer. Examples of his work in Value & Outcomes Spotlight are available at https://www.ispor.org/publications/journals/value-outcomes-spotlight. (free access)

 John has BS (Pharmacy), MPH, and PharmD degrees from the University of Washington. His pharmacy career includes ambulatory care and hospital clinical practice, drug information, missionary pharmacy work in  Nepal, and managed care pharmacy at Group Health Cooperative, Regence BlueShield, and Premera Blue Cross. He is board certified in pharmacotherapy. He is a member of the ISPOR North American HTA Roundtable, and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association’s Medical Advisory Panel.

John’s interest in formulary systems goes back to Nepal, where he established the first formal P&T committee and developed a combined formulary and drug procurement system serving 30 projects under two separate NGOs. It was there that he first became interested in the problem of managing scarce resources to maximize the value of pharmacotherapy at the patient level.

Contact: john@mc-perspectives.com, jwatkins@uw.edu