Featuring stories on the College of Pharmacy Alumni. See more stories in the BEAVERx.
Written by Marie Oliver
When Wing and Lan Chee Louie immigrated to the United States from Canton, China, after World War II, they came to provide a better future for their children. Now in their eighties, they have every right to be proud of how their children took advantage of the opportunities they were given.
Wing arrived in the United States in 1948, and Lan Chee followed in 1953 with their two children, Lana and Richard. The couple settled in Portland and opened a Chinese restaurant in McMinnville. Their first American-born child Shelton was born in 1954. Nancy and Jeannie arrived later.
The family spoke Chinese at home and picked up what English they could by working in the restaurant. Shelton said his first exposure to the English alphabet came in kindergarten.
“I remember the alphabet was written along the top of the room,” said Shelton. “I didn’t know what it was.”
As the children became fluent in English, they acted as interpreters for their parents including accompanying them to medical appointments and translating the doctors’ instructions.
Nancy’s interest in pharmacy began when she was about six years old and sometimes accompanied her parents to the drugstore. She was impressed with the relationship between the pharmacist and her parents, and how helpful the pharmacist was to them.
“I always respected people who helped my parents because we were always, as an immigrant family, interpreting for my parents,” she said. “I liked it when people were nice and had the patience to help them. I came to respect the profession.”
Even though, or perhaps because, Wing and Lan Chee had received little schooling in China, they strongly encouraged all their children to get an education. When they noticed Nancy’s interest in the drugstore, they urged her to study the sciences and told her that pharmacy was a good career for a woman.
Jeannie said her parents liked the idea of a pharmacy career because it didn’t seem to be as physically demanding as the restaurant business.
“The restaurant business is a lot of physical work—long hours, lots of lifting, lots of carrying trays and food,” she said. “They liked the idea of pharmacy because you don’t have to do as much manual labor.”
Shelton Louie
Although Shelton was older than Nancy and faced making a career choice earlier, it was her passion for a pharmacy career that eventually led him to choose it, too. He spent his first year at Reed College in Portland. He was uncertain about a career path until his father confronted him. “Dad said, ‘Why don’t you be a pharmacist like your sister?’ ” said Shelton. “So I said, ‘Okay.’ ” Smiling, he added, “And that’s the power of not wanting to disappoint your parents.”
Shelton transferred to OSU and graduated with a B.S. in pharmacy in 1978. After graduating, he went to work for Fred Meyer and worked his way into regional operations, with responsibility for the southern Oregon territory.
During his 30-year career with Fred Meyer, he noticed an industry-wide issue in the handling of “will call” prescriptions.
“Most pharmacies go to some bin and rummage through trying to find a prescription,” he said. “Hopefully they find the right one, and hopefully they don’t hand it out wrong. The reality is that as volumes have increased,‘will call’ volumes are increasing, so that people are getting it wrong. And if they hand it out wrong, it’s no different than filling it wrong. So that issue really got me to thinking. My partner said, ‘We need to fix this problem.’ So we fixed it.”
His company, GSL Solutions, Inc., offers a product based on radio frequency identification technology (RFID) that streamlines pharmacy workflow, improves the accuracy of filling and dispensing prescriptions, and reduces labor costs. The system associates a unique RFID with a prescription and acts like a global positioning system for prescriptions, automatically facilitating prescription tracking. “Our system takes human error out of ‘will call’ dispensing. Human error is the biggest problem, which is magnified in high volume pharmacies.” The U.S. military and HMO pharmacies are planning trial runs of the product this summer.
To read more about the Louie family, including Nancy Louie Lee and Jeannie Louie's stories, click here to read it in the Spring 2008 BEAVERx.
