Making a Greater Impact
I had the pleasure of participating in USP's Volunteer Leadership Meeting (VLM) in Washington, DC earlier this month. This annual gathering brings together all of USP’s volunteer leadership: the Convention Governance Committee (which considers governance around our convention), the Council of Experts (the body that oversees USP’s scientific and standards-setting decisions), the Council of the Convention (25 delegates representing member organizations), and the Board of Trustees. This year’s event was critical also as a platform to discuss USP’s draft 2025 Strategy as we are in the process of developing our strategy for the next five years, building on our strong foundation throughout our 2015-2020 cycle. We were also excited to share our 200th anniversary celebration plans with our volunteer leaders.
We opened this year’s VLM with a presentation by Yuri Maricich, Chief Medical Officer of Pear Therapeutics, who challenged our attendees to consider the inevitable future of digital therapies—one where waiting in line for your coffee can include getting medical therapy on your smartphone. The promise of such innovation has led USP to form an Expert Committee on Healthcare Information and Technology in the next cycle, ensuring USP brings together the world’s thought leaders to create standards supporting quality digital therapeutics.
Undoubtedly, my favorite part of the VLM is connecting with our volunteer leaders, learning from them about activities ongoing in their industry or practice area and having the opportunity to discuss our leadership. Perhaps a close second this year was being able to deliver a short presentation on USP’s strategic priorities through 2025, which will kick off during our 2020 convention.
For USP to advance its long-standing mission, to improve global health through public standards and related programs that help ensure the quality, safety, and benefit of medicines and foods, we will need to strengthen our activities in Standards, Advocacy and Capability Building. As importantly, we will integrate them to work in concert for our mission impact. The boldness of our proposed strategy and these ambitions is not in the novelty of the individual components, but in their comprehensiveness and the linkages between them. When these elements work in concert, it deepens the contribution of each individual component and results in increasingly higher impact on quality and public health. We recognize that as we create our standards, we must be building simultaneously both our stakeholders’ will and their capabilities to adopt and use those standards for USP to have its greatest impact on medicine quality worldwide. I am eager to share more about our 2025 strategy in the near future.
One of the clearest ways to see this impact is through USP’s collaborative efforts to fight antimicrobial resistance. A panel of cross-discipline USP staff was able to connect our efforts in linking into global antimicrobial resistance efforts first through advocacy and capability building and now including a package of standards reforms or updates supporting antibiotic quality worldwide and thereby better delivering our mission impact.
I am grateful to the hard work of staff and our volunteers as we approach this important milestone—200 years of building medicine quality around the world. I look forward to the celebration to come and am proud of the leadership and innovation that our volunteers and staff bring to strengthen USP’s mission around the world.
Regards,
Ronald T. Piervincenzi, Ph.D., CEO