Rethinking Pain Management and the Evolving Role of Pharmacy with Dr. Sterlin Elliot

Summary

Podcast Summary: Becker’s Healthcare Podcast

Episode: Rethinking Pain Management and the Evolving Role of Pharmacy with Dr. Sterlin Elliott
Date: October 11, 2025
Host: Scott Becker
Guest: Dr. Sterlin Elliott, Clinical Pharmacist Lead (OR Group), Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Assistant Professor, Feinberg School of Medicine

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Overview

This episode explores the transformation of pain management, specifically non-opioid strategies in surgical settings, and examines the changing landscape and role of pharmacy within U.S. healthcare. Dr. Sterlin Elliott shares insights from her dual background in pharmacy and communication, offering a nuanced perspective on patient care, industry evolution, and the importance of clear messaging in healthcare.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dr. Elliott’s Unique Background & Dual Expertise

• Dr. Elliott is both a clinical pharmacist lead at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and an assistant professor of orthopedic surgery.
• Her early family roots in community pharmacy shaped her approach to patient care.
• She also holds a Master's in Broadcast Journalism, which she credits as vital to her clinical effectiveness.

2. The Power of Communication in Pharmacy

• Elliott stresses the importance of strong communication with patients:

  “You don't ever really get a second shot in front of a patient. It has, I think, been invaluable.” (03:50)

• Her journalism background helps her teach foundational principles of pain management to patients and professionals.

3. The Transformation of Community Pharmacy

• Elliott recalls the era of independent pharmacies as community fixtures and details their decline due to economic pressures:

  “The late 80s and early 90s really were the epicenter of that paradigm shift.” (05:16) “We started to see prices of drugs just skyrocket... and in comes the advent and the rise of third party payers.” (05:38–06:01)

• She draws parallels between pharmacy consolidation and current trends in healthcare system consolidation:

  “Pharmacy in a lot of ways sort of laid the groundwork and you can use that as a roadmap for how healthcare systems are evolving even today.” (08:18)

4. Rethinking Traditional Approaches in Pharmacy & Pain Management

• Ongoing research is focused on innovating new practices in pain management:

  “Some of the ways in which we had settled into providing healthcare... have just dramatically shifted.” (08:53–09:55)

• Elliott encourages all levels of healthcare professionals to seek new approaches and maximize their skill sets:

  “Look for new and different things that you can do with the skills you have and figure out how to bring those to patients in a… more effective manner.” (09:57)

5. Clinical Communication about Medication Risks

• The conversation references recent concerns about medications like acetaminophen, with Elliott highlighting responsible, evidence-based messaging:

  “Our role is to really be vigilant about helping our patients understand the true essence of the outcomes… and to not become frightened by ideas that come up that may need to be vetted out extensively.” (12:09–13:48)

• She notes the tension between rapid information cycles and the need for scientific rigor.

6. Evolving Pain Management Research – Focusing on Patient Function

• Elliott’s current research pilots involve improving how patients understand and manage post-surgical pain:

  “If you talk to patients about critical elements of their recovery and how pain plays a role in it, you can dramatically shape their experience for the better.” (14:25)

• Shifts focus from pain severity to functional outcomes for recovery:

  “Taking patients away from how bad they think the pain might feel… to ‘how are you functioning?’” (15:19)

• The ultimate goal is optimizing recovery, patient satisfaction, and real-world function post-surgery.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Pharmacy Evolution:

  “The late 80s and early 90s really were the epicenter of that paradigm shift.” (05:16)

• On Communication:

  “You don't ever really get a second shot in front of a patient. It has… been invaluable.” (03:50)

• On Innovation:

  “Look for new and different things that you can do with the skills you have and… bring those to patients in a… more effective manner.” (09:57)

• On Patient-Centered Pain Management:

  “How are you functioning? Are you meeting some of these important components of functioning effectively while you're recovering?” (15:19)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:32–02:41 – Dr. Elliott’s background and career arc
• 02:41–04:13 – Importance of communication skills in pharmacy
• 05:16–08:37 – Evolution of community pharmacy and healthcare consolidation
• 08:53–09:57 – Research and the need for rethinking traditional approaches
• 10:44–13:48 – Medication risk communication and the challenges of patient messaging
• 14:03–16:04 – Current research: patient-centered approaches to post-surgical pain and function

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Where to Find Dr. Elliott & Further Resources

• Regular appearances on WGN 7:20am (First Monday each month, Lisa Dent Show)
• Northwestern Medicine’s website & Feinberg School of Medicine’s faculty listings

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This episode offers a compelling look at why pharmacy must keep evolving—with better communication, new research, and a deepening commitment to patient-centered pain care at its core.

Transcript

[A]

This is Scott Becker with the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. We're thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant and prolific leader at Northwestern Medicine. Northwestern Medicine's one of the great systems in the country. We're joined today by Sterling Elliott. She's got this fascinating background, both in pharmacy, also assistant professor of orthopedic surgery. Just a brilliant investing background. Sterling, can you take a moment and talk about what you do and give us background on yourself?

[B]

Sure. Thanks very much for having me. It's great to join this. It's great to always have these conversations and be putting new ideas out there for everybody. I'm Sterling Elliott. Like you said, I work for Northwestern Medicine where I'm the clinical pharmacist lead in our OR group at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in the city of Chicago. And so our group takes care of providing medications and insight into how to use them in the area of surgery. And over the years in the course of doing that, I got this interest in looking at pain and pain around surgery and really helping people figure out their pain after surgery. So I started doing some unique and interesting things around it. And ultimately that led me to a good relationship with our orthopedic surgeons where we were doing the bulk of this work and, and in the end we had a lot of good and interesting things we could do to develop ideas. And so that led me to a faculty appointment at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. So now I really have my feet in both sides of the Northwestern medicine machine.

[A]

And let me ask you a question. You've got this fascinating background of a brilliant pharmacist, brilliantly involved in clinical lead, doing a lot on non opioid painkillers and how to contain pain without using opioids and so forth. You've also got this background, you've got this unusual mix of both clinical pharmacy background plus a Master's of science in broadcast journalism. Talk for a little bit about the importance of communication skills as a professional and as a leader and the effort to go back and do at some point broadcast journalism degree. I mean, I know you did it right after college and so forth, but how important has that been to your ultimate success in what you do, the refining and working on communication skills? It seems like those are so, so important today.

[B]

No, I'll tell you what, it's a fantastic question. It's one that I think a lot of people want to ask me and they never do. So it's great that you did and I'm always happy to do it, you know, know I I did it years ago, thinking that was going to be a career. And the. The economic landscape of that industry just foundationally shifted. It was a paradigm shift, and it was clear that it wasn't going to be that way. And I went back to my family roots. My family has roots in owning and operating community pharmacy in the north side of the city of Chicago for as long as I could remember, and I ended up back there in pharmacy. And you flash forward and you start doing this and you start putting together this idea, and you realize that sort of the central element to what we've been able to do for patients and do with patients, in terms of helping them with their care, is to really teach them and help them understand the foundational principles of when do you use what tools that you have in your toolbox to help manage pain?

[A]

And.

[B]

And I think maybe even without knowing it, Scott, being able to leverage some of the broadcast skills and some of those communication skills, being able to put forth a message in front of somebody, really in an organic fashion, because you don't ever really get a second shot in front of a patient. It has, I think, been invaluable.

[A]

That's fantastic. And talk for a moment about that. You grew up in this sort of community pharmacy world. That world, of course, has changed so much. We share the destination. I'm from the Skokie, right off the north side of the city originally, and, you know, grew up where we had different independent pharmacies. Endler, Keys, Musk and Henriksen and all those, and Dempster, Rexall, which grew into a bigger, bigger chain. And so many. And then so many, you know, Parkway drugs, and so many independent pharmacies are up here. And it seems like that consolidation has been on steroids the last couple decades. Can you talk about that for one moment in terms of how the world of pharmacy has changed? Because I think it's such an interesting part of so much of our. Of our. Of our growing up and seeing this change to where now everything. CVS or Walgreens talk about how that world has changed so much.

[B]

Oh, I. I don't think there's any question that it has. It's, you know, the. The late 80s and early 90s really were the epicenter of that paradigm shift. Right. You. You really started to see all of these longstanding pillars and beacons of local communities. My family included, getting out of that business in. In terms of operating a pharmacy that served the people of their community. In my case, my family was Rosen's Pharmacy on Devon. And, you know, I Grew up as a little kid walking in there with my mom and her dad was the founder of the pharmacy and my uncle was his partner hand in hand. And, and, and they were, they were fixtures of that community. And I remember seeing that and you know, that, that really took a, a dramatic difference. And, and I think we saw that. To your point, with all of those others that, that you've mentioned over the course of your time living in the Skokie area. I think what we saw was this, this sort of move of this, I guess, for lack of a better term, perfect storm of business circumstances really converging to reshape the economic foundation of the business of pharmacy. We started to see prices of drugs just skyrocket and it became clear that prices were moving down to the patients and the patients were, were having more difficulty. So of course, in comes the advent and the rise of third party payers. And as third party payers drive the prices. I think the, the reality of economic conditions, especially in, in a free market economy, sort of brought us to this point where we had now these predominantly large purveyors of pharmacy services, which focused on trying to effectively and efficiently move prescriptions to patients on a larger scale because that was what was needed to support the economic realities of the industry. And I think you can sort of look at that and extrapolate that to now what we're seeing in healthcare systems. Right. I think, Scott, you can probably agree with me that we're seeing a lot of those same circumstances coming together as larger healthcare systems are becoming the predominant machines and often taking on some of those smaller community facilities. And even, you know, my colleagues in medicine and surgery, physicians are starting to see that too, as fewer and fewer physicians operate their own private business enterprises and they move toward becoming employed members of a large health system. So I think pharmacy in a lot of ways sort of laid the groundwork and you can use that as a roadmap for how healthcare systems are evolving even today.

[A]

No, 100%. I think that that's right on. So talk for a moment about what you're watching closely currently in the, in the pharmacy world, in the research world. What's top of mind for you currently, Sterling?

[B]

I think what's top of mind for me and what I always try to talk to people about is to be looking at different ways to approach things we've known and worked with for a long period of time. Because I think that what we're seeing in a number of different examples is that some of the ways in which we had settled into Providing health care, be it cardiovascular services, surgical services, managing pain, being a part of bringing the drugs to patients and their providers to help in those processes. A lot of those things have just dramatically shifted, and a lot of it is being driven by economic circumstances.

[A]

And.

[B]

And I think a lot of it is being driven by the natural evolution of healthcare and any scientific endeavor, which is we think we know things and we believe we've been acting in everybody's best interest. And time is beginning to tell us, and the body of work from that time is beginning to tell us that we might need a new direction. And so I think, for me, I always like to encourage people, whether it's leaders at the highest levels of health systems or it's pharmacists, physicians, nurses, physical therapists, you name it, working in the trenches every day, seeing patients moment by moment by moment to look for new and different things that you can do with the skills you have and to figure out how to. How to bring those to patients in a. Maybe a more effective manner. And that's sort of what our research efforts in and around the pain element.

[A]

Are looking to do 100%. And how do you see some of that evolving? Obviously, there's been so much discussion this past week about the acetam phetamine, and I'm pronouncing it incorrectly because I'm not a.

[B]

So was the president. So that's okay.

[A]

So we're okay. Exactly, exactly. But you see these different issues evolving, and then you also end up in a situation with the. Pharmaceutical companies are so concerned about liability that they almost double down on the message and say, yeah, we've always told you not to take it during pregnancy, which gives them sort of like, we've always had the warning, stuff like that. How do you sort of view some of that? Or how do we. How do we manage through a lot of those things?

[B]

This. It's a great question now, and I will tell you, it's sort of an unfortunate question in that I think we're. We're. We're always trying to do that. We always want to do that. We always want to make sure that our, our patients understand the best ways to use the different tools they have. And we want to make sure that they understand the context of the. The scientific background and especially the evidence that supports its use. And when I say that, I don't necessarily mean how does it work, what does it do? But I mean, how does it behave and bring about an outcome for a patient? Because that's really the gold standard of everything. We're always looking at. And, you know, my thought is, particularly in the example you just broached with acetaminophen, is that I think we need to still be very mindful of following the scientific guidance that we know and to not get caught up in some of the, some of the rapid messaging that comes about and to really understand the basis of what's going on. And I think it's hard because messaging is a critical component. We talked about this earlier. I got a degree in broadcast journalism, and one of the things you study in the course of that is messaging and how people get your get messages out and what is your role in it. And so I, I think for us in the healthcare world right now, our role is to really be vigilant about helping our patients understand the true essence of the outcomes behind the things that they're, that we're doing and to really get them to, to sort of get a hook. And that's a term we use in journalism is what's the hook for the consumer. Get them to hook on to what's legitimate and what's real and what's in their overall best interest and to not become frightened by ideas that come up that may need to be vetted out extensively. Probably a lot more so than they have been.

[A]

Sure. No, I think that's a great way of looking at it and talk from what, as you head into this next year, what are you most excited about? What are you working on that you're most excited about and most focused on and excited about?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I remain for myself, still focused on and working very diligently at some of the research efforts that we're looking at to try and bring some of these new ideas of pain management and how you approach it and really how you get the message across to patients. And so my colleagues and I in orthopedic surgery have some burgeoning pilot studies where we're trying to really make it evident that if you talk to patients about critical elements of their recovery and how pain plays a role in it, that you can dramatically shape their experience for the better. And not only so that it benefits us as a health system in the form of positive feedback and perception by the patients, but most importantly, because the patients realize that they did the best job they possibly could with managing their pain, and they brought themselves to a point where they optimized a recovery, had the best outcome, and they've got a great return to function. And that's really, I think, to me, what's so exciting because, you know, I talked about ultimately a return to function. And one of the things that we're doing with all of this work around pain is taking patients away from how bad they think the pain might feel, because that's really all our rating systems tell us to how are you functioning? Are you meeting some of these important components of functioning effectively while you're recovering after surgery? Because if and when you do, when you're done with the recovery, you're going to be functioning at your best every day after you've had the surgery to repair what was wrong.

[A]

Thank you very, very much. Sterling, where could people learn more about you and follow the work that you do?

[B]

Sure. I think there's a number of different places you can follow. Find me a lot in the media. I spend a lot of time now talking to the media. And so I think if you, if you Google me, you'll find a lot of examples of things that I have done to sort of bring the message to the the people I happen to get have the opportunity to do a monthly appearance in Chicago on, on one of Chicago's most iconic radio voices, WGN 7:20am and you hear me every Monday, the first Monday. Well, the first Monday of every month. You hear me. Time varies so that we, we catch different fractions of the audience. And that's with Lisa Dent, who's hosted the afternoon drivetime radio show for years. And you can find some information on me on Northwestern's websites as well as well Northwestern Medicine as well as the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University.

[A]

That is really a remarkable, remarkable career. Sterling, a great pleasure to visit with you. Can't wait to have you back on. You're so thoughtful on so many different subjects. Just literally fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today.

[B]

It was a pleasure to join you, Scott.