To the Editor.— We read with much interest the recent COMMENTARY concerning the doctor of pharmacy by John Biles, PhD. One innovation at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine and its primary teaching hospital, Harry S Truman Medical Center, is the addition of clinical pharmacists as full-time members of the patient care and education teams. These practitioner-educators share responsibilities for patient drug therapy and for the provision of instruction in basic and clinical pharmacology. 1 Examination of the impact of these practitioners in separate studies indicates that they substantially increase cost-effectiveness in drug therapy. In a study concerning the impact of the clinical pharmacist in the treatment of pneumococcal pneumonia, it was found that physicians exposed to these persons treated all cases of pneumococcal pneumonia with standard antibiotic therapy—penicillin— as compared with physicians who did not have clinical pharmacists on their team. 2 The total cost of antibiotic