For more than 100 years, New Brunswick, N.J.-based Saint Peter’s University Hospital has served people across central New Jersey. Founded in 1907, Saint Peter’s is now a 478-bed teaching hospital that is part of the Saint Peter’s Healthcare System, a non-profit, acute care facility sponsored by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Metuchen, N.J. The Children’s Hospital at Saint Peter’s University Hospital operates one of the largest and most advanced neonatal intensive care units in the country as part of the hospital’s state-designation as a Regional Perinatal Center. Along with joining the 340B Drug Pricing Program in 2014, St. Peter’s University Hospital is also a Disproportionate Share Hospital, which the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration defines as serving a significantly disproportionate number of low-income patients.
“We’re in Middlesex County, which has a poverty rate about 50 percent higher than New Jersey’s average,” says Fatimah Muhammad, 340B Pharmaceutical Services Program Director for St. Peter’s Healthcare System. “All of the revenue generated from the 340B Program lets us support patients’ needs like offering lab services, so a patient can go from an appointment to get their prescription filled. Our mission, care team, and the 340B Program strive to maintain continuity of care.”
Managing St. Peter’s 340B Program has only grown more complex during the years since Muhammad joined the health system in 2017. At that time, St. Peter’s had contracts in place with less than 20 pharmacies; today the number is 88. That’s a function of St. Peter’s mission and the health system’s desire, in part, to increase access to pharmacies in low-income neighborhoods. As the number of pharmacies at the health system has grown, St. Peter’s has relied on SectyrHub® 340B, which is SaaS compliance software with logic-based workflows for users to efficiently manage a 340B Program.
“SectyrHub stores all our pharmacy contracts and displays who we’ve contracted with, while ensuring HRSA compliance” adds Muhammad. “SectyrHub–with its dashboard and weekly status updates–manages the requirements for compliance.”
St. Peter’s ‘Gatekeeper’
According to Muhammad, SectyrHub also holds a reservoir of St. Peter’s policies and procedures, pharmacy services agreements, and other relevant 340B Program files. She says the software’s color-coded dashboard illustrates the percentage of pending documents, upcoming deadlines, and other items for review. Once the software calculates the percentage, the system issues a report describing what’s required to meet HRSA thresholds, and this allows great security and cohesion for 340B Programs to mirror OPAIS. Muhammad refers to the software as St. Peter’s “gatekeeper for records.” SectyrHub also gives Muhammad a way to easily upload information from St. Peter’s third-party administrators for easy access by anyone who contributes to the success of the program internally. Once Muhammad and her team upload their TPA transactions, SectyrHub gives users a single pane from which to see all the transactions and determine the ones the team must audit.
“We were audited by HRSA in March 2022, and our Sectyr account manager ensured everything in our system coincided with HRSA’s guidelines,” recalls Muhammad. “That input and SectyrHub itself complements the 340B program consulting services we get through Ponaman [Healthcare Consulting].”
For St. Peter’s, SectyrHub helps its 304B Program consultants monitor and identify trouble spots with compliance that Ponaman Healthcare Consulting can then help correct.
“That’s added value from SectyrHub for any 340B consultant,” notes Muhammad.
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