SectyrHub® LicenseTrak® helps pharmacy owner leverage time, maintain accreditations
Founded in 1973, Conrad, Iowa-headquartered NuCara has grown from a rural retail pharmacy to become the owner and manager of more than 30 full-service community-based pharmacies and 10 medical equipment locations across Iowa, Texas, North Dakota, and Minnesota. NuCara’s pharmacy services include filling conventional prescriptions along with supplying home and durable medical equipment. NuCara specializes in compounding medicines, infusion services, and long-term-care pharmacy services.
“Every day, our aim is delivering the best pharmacy services along with high-quality care for our patients,” says Brett Barker, vice president of Operations at NuCara. “We emphasize care because we’re about more than just filling medications; we see ourselves as part of a patient’s health care team.”
From training to certification
In 2019, NuCara switched from using mostly paper-based methods for assigning and tracking its training to an automated process via SectyrHub LicenseTrak compliance software. According to Barker, while NuCara could produce its records, with a largely manual process, his team always found it difficult to gather documentation to show accreditors and other interested parties the company’s completed education.
With SectyrHub LicenseTrak, the human resources department could assign education and training tasks to the Iowa-based company’s staff, while also tracking the completion of continuing education. Having an automated, integrated way to keep tabs on the outcome of continuing education taken via SectyrHub LicenseTrak’s learning management system, or LMS, also underpinned the company’s efforts to obtain accreditations from the Accreditation Commission for Health Care.
NuCara employs about 500 people who must complete a variety of training tasks. Barker says, with SectyrHub LicenseTrak, NuCara has increased the efficiency with which it educates its workers. For example, NuCara can assign training action-items and administrative tasks to managers and employees, so its HR team isn’t bogged down with orchestrating and following-up on the completion of certifications and CE.
The daily users of SectyrHub LicenseTrak include not only NuCara’s HR team but also corporate staff and employees at its work sites checking on the status of licenses and the education calendar. Everyone in the company taps into the LMS at least once a month for classes, and leaders for the pharmacies and home equipment locations log in to Sectyr LicenseTrak daily to track progress and completions.
“That’s where we started with SectyrHub LicenseTrak — tracking certifications,” adds Barker. “Now we’re using it to digitize our procedures and track tasks like controlled-substance inventory, refrigerator temperatures, reviewing CQI data, processing returns, and more.”
According to Barker, SectyrHub LicenseTrak enables him and his team to build better relationships with the people across NuCara’s work sites. Because Barker and other managers regularly get reminders and updates via SectyrHub LicenseTrak about the completion of tasks at the company’s work sites, when they visit NuCara’s locations, they can make better use of their time than reviewing, say, self-inspection lists.
“When I go to a site, I want to build relationships, rather than scanning checklists or doing a mock inspection,” Barker says. “Sectyr LicenseTrak helps me spend time on site getting to know our people and their challenges versus reviewing expiration dates on a wall; it helps us have more valuable interactions.”
Along with automatically monitoring the review of pharmacy processes and tasks, Barker notes SectyrHub LicenseTrak keeps tabs on the status of NuCara’s pharmacies’ licenses. With the licenses automatically accounted for in SectyrHub LicenseTrak, the compliance software can prepare NuCara’s staff for obtaining accreditations with ACHC and other governing bodies.
“LicenseTrak has a template with all the ACHC accreditation tasks, and we can add to those when there’s something specific to a state board of pharmacy and our SOPs,” notes Barker. “LicenseTrak helps guide us to accreditation and keep us there.”