Does Academic Pharmacy Reward the Work It Depends on? Applying Improvement Science to Faculty Systems

Academic pharmacy increasingly depends on faculty work beyond traditional research productivity, including teaching, clinical and experiential education, assessment, remediation, service, leadership, and educational innovation. However, systems for effort assignment, evaluation, and advancement may not recognize these contributions with comparable clarity. This commentary frames faculty-system alignment across 3 lenses: contribution (what work faculty perform), recognition (whether work counts in evaluation and advancement), and accountability (whether expectations are explicit, role-appropriate, and consistently applied). Competency-based pharmacy education provides a timely stress test because its implementation may create substantial work in assessment, feedback, remediation, curricular alignment, faculty development, and continuous quality improvement. Institutions should consider who performs the task, whether the assigned effort reflects it, and whether recognition systems adapt to it. Improvement science offers a practical method for identifying local misalignments, testing targeted changes, and monitoring unintended consequences.