Dr. Neil M Davis served as a faculty member from 1965 to 1992. In addition to his undergraduate teaching responsibilities, he initiated and maintained a hospital pharmacy MS graduate program and was responsible for the assigning of all of the students to hospitals for their externship requirement.

As part of his externship management role, Dr. Davis noticed the problems students encountered during their externship in not knowing the meaning of medically related abbreviations. This problem resulted him to gather a list of the most commonly used medical abbreviations, which he eventually published in the book, “Medical Abbreviations: 1,700 Conveniences at the Expense ofCommunication and Safety.”  Sixteen editions of the book were published with the last printed edition containing 55,000 abbreviations. Dr. Davis started a website of the book in 2001 (medabbrev.com) which was updated weekly and now contains over 108,000 abbreviations and is used by both individual healthcare practitioners and major hospitals and health industries.

From 1965 to 1977, Dr. Davis was also director of Pharmacy Services at Temple University Hospital (TUH). Under his directorship, the pharmacy was one of the first US hospitals to initiate a decentralized unit dose dispensing system, clinical pharmacy practices, and intravenous additive programs. Dr. Davis also served as editor-in-chief of the monthly refereed journal, Hospital Pharmacy, for 30 years.

Dr. Davis’ major interest was in hospital medication errors. In 1983, he coauthored the book,”Medical Errors: Causes and Prevention.” He cofounded the Institute For Safe Medication Practices Inc (ISMP) and the National Medication Error Reporting Program. These two programs have turned out to be a major foundation of the medication safety programs that have been instituted throughout the world.

In 2000, Dr. Davis received the Americal Society of Health-Systems Pharmacists Harvey A.K. Whitney Lecture Award, honoring outstanding contributions to the practice of pharmacy in health systems.