Key Clinical Summary: 

• Design/Context: Overview of the HERO Consortium, a pharmacist-led, multicenter research collaborative focused on generating real-world evidence in hematology.
• Key Points: The consortium has expanded to include multiple institutions and investigators, enabling larger datasets, improved research efficiency, and increased productivity in multicenter studies.
• Clinical Relevance: Standardized collaborative infrastructure may enhance the quality and impact of pharmacist-led research and support broader implementation of real-world evidence generation across oncology.

Sarah Proffitt, PharmD, BCOP, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, discusses the development and impact of the Hematology Research and Outcomes (HERO) Consortium, a pharmacist-led, multicenter research collaborative. The consortium aims to standardize collaborative research and improve the rigor and impact of pharmacist-led studies.

These results were presented by Ila Saunders, PharmD, BCOP, Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, La Jolla, California, at the Hematology/Oncology Pharmacy Association (HOPA) Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. 

Transcript: 

My name is Sarah Proffitt, I am a clinical pharmacy specialist in adult malignant hematology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, and this year, I’m also serving as chair of the Hematology Research and Outcomes (HERO) Consortium.

At the recent Hematology/Oncology Pharmacy Association (HOPA) Annual Conference 2026, I had the privilege, alongside our consortium co-chair Ila Saunders, to highlight our work entitled, “building real-world evidence through the HERO consortium: A pharmacist-led multicenter initiative.”

This was really an opportunity for us to share the HERO Consortium’s inception, our growth, our productivity, and our current makeup, including both individual member demographics and the demographics of the institutions that make up the consortium.

About five years ago, a group of hematology clinical pharmacists from about 7 or 8 institutions across the United States came together to begin forming a pharmacist-led multicenter research collaborative. Recognizing the limited impact of single-center studies with lower patient numbers, many of us had been pursuing multicenter research projects and publications individually. And quickly, the limitations of executing data use agreements and coordinating each new project—essentially reinventing the wheel each time—became really evident. That’s what led us to begin building the infrastructure of our organization.

Our core objectives are to develop standardized and streamlined approaches for collaborative, pharmacist-led research, to provide expanded patient populations, data, and resources to conduct multicenter research, to improve the efficiency of multicenter and collaborative research efforts, to conduct and disseminate robust, high-quality, practice-changing original research, and to increase the rigor and credibility of pharmacist-led research overall.

Over the last 5 years, we’ve experienced tremendous and exciting growth. We now have 24 institutions across the United States represented, with 40 individual members from those institutions, all hematology clinical pharmacists. We’ve expanded our geographic reach significantly and added greater diversity to the patient populations we serve, which increases the value of the work we are able to do.

In terms of productivity, we’ve had several projects reach completion and be presented at the American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting, now with presentations at HOPA as well. We have several more ongoing projects and have recently received our first official grant funding.

We were also able to collect demographic data from our individual members and institutions, which were highlighted in our HOPA poster presentation, along with the overall makeup and geographic reach of the consortium.

There are definitely exciting next steps, as well as some limitations that we continue to work through. Most of our members report that they do not have dedicated research time in their current clinical roles—72% report no dedicated research time—which limits our ability to continue rapid and productive work through the consortium. One of our goals moving forward is to identify ways to increase dedicated research time for our members.

We also aim to increase the rigor of our studies and the impact of our work through more robust methodology and larger patient populations. We will continue to pursue alternative funding sources to support the consortium’s infrastructure.

Overall, we were very excited to present the demographic makeup, as well as the history and growth of our consortium, at the HOPA Annual Meeting.

In conclusion, the Hematology Research and Outcomes (HERO) Consortium is a pharmacist-led, multicenter research collaborative across the United States, composed of experienced clinician-researchers—clinical pharmacists in hematology—from health systems with broad institutional and geographic reach. Our infrastructure has facilitated standardized collaborative research efforts and underscores the potential impact of this model in increasing the rigor of pharmacist-led research, both within hematology and beyond.

Source: 

Saunders IM, Proffitt S, et al. Building real-world evidence through the HERO consortium: A pharmacist-led multicenter initiative. Presented at the HOPA Annual Conference. March 25 - 27, 2026. New Orleans, Louisiana. LB04.