Kyle Coryell: Leading change in care and community

Even before pharmacy school, Dr. Kyle Coryell wanted to be an agent of change. She felt confident that residency at the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy would prepare her to be an incredible practitioner, but she was influenced to pursue the Combined PGY1 Residency & Practice Advancement Fellowship specifically by a desire to share a legacy with the many faculty she respected who had graduated from the program track. 

Coryell, a 2020 graduate of the program, now leads a team of pharmacists and clinical staff at North Memorial Health Clinic and serves on the New Hope City Council, where she’s made servant leadership— “leading from within the masses”— her top priority. 

“We all have voices to influence growth and change in others and learning how to do that more effectively has been very instrumental for how my life has turned out,” she said. “What's most important to me is that everyone has a voice and that I do what I can to strategically help amplify that voice. The leadership residency really helped propel me to that point.”

Coryell met for weekly leadership discussions with Dr. Todd Sorensen, the college’s senior executive associate dean for strategic initiatives and faculty affairs and founding director of the residency program. Sorensen mentored her on leadership development and effective methods of communicating, storytelling, and influencing, skills that Coryell said are critical to providing patient care. School prepares students with the knowledge to provide pharmaceutical care, but residency prepares them to be in a room with a patient, she said. 

“As an ambulatory care pharmacist, it's very important to be able to meet your patient where they're at and find out what influences them, what makes them tick, and where they come from when they're making decisions, then use that information to be a guide in their health care journey,” she said. “Those [skills] became wildly applicable in ways I didn't even anticipate at the time.”

Coryell notices the application of those leadership abilities in her day-to-day life, whether she’s communicating the importance of medication therapy management to providers at North Memorial or meeting with New Hope constituents about the municipal budget.  

“Being a representative for a group of people is very similar to the practice of medication therapy management— everyone has their own individual ideas and passions and being able to learn about those from someone’s perspective is critical for any role that I've had in leadership,” Coryell said. 

In her first year of residency, Coryell said she learned what an effectively managed practice looks like, as well as “what it looks like to practice alongside pharmacists who are ingrained within the [health care] team.” She recalled a lesson Sorensen taught her— that sometimes she’ll need to stand her ground and fight for what she feels is important— which informed her decisions during a second-year residency at North Memorial’s Camden clinic, where they hadn’t had a pharmacist before. Now, as a pharmacist on her clinic’s primary care leadership team, she’s able to advocate for the value of a pharmacist on a health care team. 

“Now, I'm there with [primary care leadership] helping to say from a pharmacy perspective, ‘This is how we can improve care for our patients, this is how we can improve work life balance for our [medical] providers, or decrease cost of care,’” Coryell said. “I don't think I would have been able to feel as confident about those discussions without the experiences that I learned about in the residency program.”