Approximately five years ago, Amber Specialty Pharmacy began using SectyrHub® LicenseTrak® compliance software to manage accreditations, report on incidents, and track the expiration and renewal of professional and facility licenses. Before tapping SectyrHub LicenseTrak, Amber Specialty Pharmacy managed these tasks manually with spreadsheets, to-do lists, and written reminders.
By automating the manual tasks for proving accreditation, managers can easily document and easily retrieve EOC. In fact, the task management module in SectyrHub LicenseTrak helps managers do this.
In today’s post, I am emphasizing why incident management must be part of any compliance management software solution. In my other posts for this series, I note the criticality of managing tasks and licenses with compliance management software. Managing incidents is no less important and perhaps more vital.
Many pharmacy managers find themselves struggling to keep track of which licenses are active and in good standing. Without license management functionality, they must check multiple sources for status and find themself scrambling to see upcoming tasks. Why spend valuable time sending emails to remind colleagues about due dates and hunting for information about licenses?
“If we didn’t have LicenseTrak, we’d need one, maybe two, FTE to track everything,” says one of the company’s HR specialists. “The complexity and volume of managing what we’re tracking makes a manual process unfeasible.”
According to the company’s HR team, there is no limit to the number of pharmacies, pharmacists, and licenses they can keep track of with SectyrHub LicenseTrak. The software helps the firm grow as it adds employees, locations. “LicenseTrak helps us sustain that growth,” one of the company’s HR specialists says.
Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Avera Health serves patients across South Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and North Dakota through its 37 hospitals, 215 clinics, 40 senior living facilities and more. The integrated health system cares for nearly one million patients across 72,000 square miles. As the health ministry of the Benedictine Sisters of Yankton, S.D., and the Presentation Sisters of Aberdeen, S.D., Avera encourages its 20,000 employees to live by the Gospel values of compassion, hospitality, and stewardship. Although Avera’s tagline is “moving health forward,” Avera Pharmacies, part of Avera McKennan Hospital & University Health Center, found moving forward with license renewals arduous. Struggling to track licensing, accreditations, and incidents With spreadsheets, paper checklists and manual tabulations, the pharmacy tracked critical license renewals largely by hand. The pharmacy’s compliance coordinator felt the system would eventually fail in… Read More »Avera taps Sectyr LicenseTrak for compliance trifecta
Indianapolis-based Damien Center “is Indiana’s oldest and largest AIDS service organization (ASO).” The center, founded in 1987, provides healthcare and education to more than 8,000 individuals living with and at risk for HIV. Damien Center is also a Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program grantee, so the clinic receives federal funding to treat and care for those living with HIV who have little or no insurance. The HIV/AIDS Bureau, part of the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, administers the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program.
“We wanted one solution to track not only our pharmacy’s regulatory documents, like our DEA license, but also insurance policies and licenses for providers,” says Brad Plunkett, director of Pharmacy Services for Damien Center. “We were using multiple systems to do it.
“We worked with a consultancy, and they had software that automated some of our needs,” Plunkett adds. “I’d heard of LicenseTrak, explored it, and thought, ‘Ok, we can use this across our platforms.’”
By Craig Frost When people raise the topic of accreditation, the word often causes anxiety. But why? Accreditation is a way to prove a pharmacy meets a baseline of competencies. To become accredited, a pharmacy will have policies and procedures in place, certain equipment, and capabilities in its facility to meet the standards of the accrediting body. Accreditation can also be a prerequisite for payment. For instance, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services turn to the Joint Commission, a deemed status provider for accreditation, to accredit healthcare provider organizations. If a pharmacy fails accreditation by the Joint Commission or other deemed status provider, then CMS must consider whether to exclude the pharmacy. CMS may send a Medicare surveyor to take a closer look. So, in this case, accreditation, or the lack thereof, can get… Read More »Four tools for taking the anxiety out of accreditation