By Lee Sherman
Built like the Montana mountains where he grew up, Cory Huot was courted by both the Ducks and the Beavers to play fullback in 1990.
Many hours after climbing aboard an eight-passenger chartered plane in Butte for his recruiting trip to Eugene, Huot got a jolt of culture shock. The boy from Deer Lodge County on the Continental Divide had never seen “hippies in Birkenstocks and dreadlocks,” he recalls. “My host at the University of Oregon was a California surfer dude driving a white Corvette. I just didn’t connect.”
OSU, on the other hand, fit the 6-foot, 3-inch, 225-pound scholar-athlete like a comfortable pair of sneakers. When his recruiters took him to the Coast Range to fish for trout in the cold, clear Alsea River, he knew for sure that he wanted to wear the Orange and Black. “They made me feel at home,” he says.
What he didn’t expect when he signed up for Beaver Football was the career path he wound up pursuing. A top student who took Advanced Placement science and math at Montana’s Anaconda High School, he started out as a general business student. But he switched to the College of Pharmacy after another OSU football star, his brother Tony “Slo” Huot, announced, “I’ve decided to go into pharmacy.”
Cory’s surprised response was, “Really? That’s a really tough program — a bunch of chemistry. How much do pharmacists make, anyway?”
Cory liked Tony’s answer about potential earnings. “OK,” Cory said. “I’m in.”
Just as the Alsea River fishing trip instantly clinched his decision to come to OSU, so the promise of a comfortable salary settled his career plans then and there.
It turns out, however, that Cory found a lot more to like about his profession than just the paycheck. The 40-year-old alum brings the same drive, energy and success he showed on the gridiron to his position as manager of pharmacy services for Portland’s Legacy Health Systems. Whether he’s talking about the coaches who toughened him up (especially head coach Jerry Pettibone and assistant coach Brady Hoke, now head coach at the University of Michigan) or the importance of getting pharmacists “out into the community” to do clinical assessments of patients’ medication needs, Huot speaks with animation and passion. Whether he’s telling about the time he sacked the Washington State University quarterback two weeks after having knee surgery (and broke his hand doing it) or he is describing the anticoagulation clinic he manages, he is a force to be reckoned with.
“With 800 patients, ours is the biggest anticoagulation clinic in the Legacy system,” says Huot, who also directs inpatient and outpatient pharmacy services from his office in Northwest Portland. “We monitor drug interactions, dosing and diet for patients who have atrial fibrillation or who are at risk for strokes or clots. It requires the highest level of interaction between the pharmacist and the patient, using the physician’s protocol to manage the disease through proper use of medications. We have been unbelievably successful with patient outcomes.”
Not content to rest on his laurels, Huot wants to expand clinical services to encompass more health needs, including diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, asthma and COPD (chronic lung disease).
“About 70 percent of Medicare and Medicaid costs go to treating those five diseases,” says Huot, who has recently completed an MBA at Marylhurst University.
“Cory is a rising star in the Legacy Health System,” says Paige Clark, Director of Alumni Relations for the College of Pharmacy. “I expect to see him move into a top executive leadership position in the organization. His clinical pharmacy skills, his leadership and management skills and his patient care skills are exceptional — he built and runs the most successful anticoagulation clinic in all of the Portland-metro area.”
Tony Huot, too, has built a successful career in pharmacy, working as a physician liaison and informatics specialist in Helena, Montana. He passed up a full-ride athletic scholarship at Stanford to play for the Beavers, according to Cory. He remembers Tony saying, “Palo Alto’s not me.”
Generation Next
Someone else who has found success at OSU is a young man from a different cultural experience altogether: Honolulu. A native of the Hawaiian island of Oahu, Wilder McAndrews grew up among coconut palms, pink bougainvillea, white-sand beaches and healing ocean breezes. Despite the constant temptations of sun and surf, he aced math and science at Kamehameha Schools while attaining all-around-athlete status. When he signed on as an offensive tackle for the Beavers four years ago, he was following in the footsteps of “a bunch of friends” who had played ball in Corvallis. “I always wanted to go to OSU,” he says, simply.
Once here, the 6-foot, 6-inch, 290-pound lineman found career inspiration in Bill Boyce, director of pharmacy for OSU’s Student Health Center, during a job-shadow at the center. “Bill was very influential in leading me toward pharmacy,” says McAndrews, who is set to begin his doctoral program in the College of Pharmacy this fall. “His accomplishments are lengthy, and he’s a great role model. OSU is lucky to have him.”
Aaron Nichols, a buddy of McAndrews from Honolulu and Beaver wide receiver, also has been accepted into the pharmacy program. He’ll enter this fall — that is, unless he gets an offer from the NFL after spending the summer training with the pros.
Playing football while keeping up with the brutal pre-pharmacy course-load is not for the feint of heart.
Pharmacy Dean Mark Zabriskie, who was one of Huot’s favorite professors, says: “I was impressed that anyone could play Division I football and also handle pharmacy classes. It’s a tremendous workload. Division I football is practically a full-time job all by itself.”
For both Huot and McAndrews, the physical rigors and mental demands of football instilled the stamina and discipline to tackle a curriculum that includes organic chemistry, molecular biology, calculus, microbiology, human anatomy and physiology and statistics. Huot, who describes winter conditioning as akin to “military boot camp,” remembers grabbing every spare minute to study, even airborne on the team plane. “Everybody made fun of me, but I’d say, ‘Hey, I gotta read this chapter.’”
Explains McAndrews: “Football taught me that failure is not an option. I definitely have to give football credit for my academic achievements. If I ever did poorly in school or in football, I would make it a goal not to let the same mistake happen again. I would do everything in my power to correct it.”
The Human Touch
Another thing that drew both Huot and McAndrews to their profession is the patient-to-pharmacist connection.
“Pharmacists get to interact with people regularly,” says McAndrews. “The social aspect of the profession attracted me. I wanted to have public contact in my career choice.”
Huot gets frustrated by the notion, commonly held by the American public, that pharmacists do little more than count meds and fill prescriptions. Unlike physicians, who may see their patients only infrequently, pharmacists interact with many patients in an “ongoing and persistent” relationship, helping them to manage their medications — and their wellbeing — over time. As the health-care system becomes more and more overburdened, pharmacists will play an ever-larger role in patient care, Huot predicts. By effectively managing medication therapies, he points out, pharmacists play a key role in holding down costs for patients, insurers and health systems by minimizing adverse events and decreasing emergency-room visits and hospitalizations.
“Doctors are trained to diagnose,” he notes. “But if a patient needs a cholesterol-lowering drug, the doctor consults with the pharmacist to decide which drug to prescribe. I’m an advocate for letting pharmacists handle more of the treatment. Pharmacists are very well-positioned to meet the demands of health care in the 21st century.”