Rui Su (PharmD’18) is the 2021 School of Pharmacy Alumni Achievement Award recipient. She received the award virtually at our recent CE Saturday event. This award recognizes and celebrates pharmacy alumni who impact the health and well-being of society through professional work and/or public service contribution. Her contributions echo through community pharmacies across Canada.
“This is such a tremendous honor. This award is not only for me but it’s for my team behind MedMe Health. To us the most important thing that we look at is how can we help make an impact in this world,” Su says.
She is the Co-founder, COO and Chief Clinical Officer of MedMe Health, a healthcare company committed to the advancement of pharmacy clinical services including the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in pharmacies across Canada.
MedMe Health helps enable pharmacies to provide services to improve the health of Canadians by streamlining their workflows, expanding their patient relationships, growing their practice and more. After only three years, MedMe Health services more than 3,500 pharmacies across Canada.
As an immigrant and a woman of colour, Su was taught to follow the status quo, keep her head down, not take up space and work hard. For a large part of her life this mentality was a hindrance, as she was not able to look at the issues and challenges within the system.
“We need to be advocates to really push for change. To take the risky and unconventional path to make bigger changes,” she says.
It was at the University of Waterloo where the school’s ecosystem changed her perspective on where she wanted to take her career and future. She was exposed to big tech and the allure of massive wealth and opportunities her peers were experiencing in engineering.
“I had always put founders on this pedestal. I imagined them to have intangible traits and incredible confidence that allowed them to enter this abyss of risk and uncertainty with so much conviction. I admired them but never saw myself as someone able to take the risk that came with being a founder,” Su says.
Seeing extremely driven ambitious people, with massive dreams on making an impact despite their lack of experience and young age, was transformational for Su. She was inspired and began looking at the world in a way she hadn’t looked at it before.
As pharmacists working in the community we can all be founders and entrepreneurs in the same vein to fix and solve problems that we see, whether they be individual or system level problems. I want to encourage and help others to open the opportunities to what we can do together when we look at creative solutions and to embrace change to open new chapters in our profession.
Additionally, she has co-authored several nationally accredited pharmacy programs, serves as a preceptor for PharmD students at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo and is a speaker at pharmacy forums and on podcasts. She has been featured in the Canadian Business Magazine about her journey from pharmacist to founder.
Su is especially interested in improving pharmacists’ involvement in patient care through innovative models of virtual and interdisciplinary care and is currently authoring a series on Digital Health in Pharmacy.
Rui Su is the fifth recipient of the annual School of Pharmacy Alumni Achievement Award.