With LicenseTrak^® software, health system boosts auditors’ confidence, saves hundreds of hours per year

INSPIRATION FOR CHANGE

Multiple people using spreadsheets to track hundreds of licenses

A large Midwestern health system’s retail pharmacy operation, which offers services for specialty, home delivery, and on-site pharmacies, tracks licenses for 200 individuals and multiple pharmacies across 20 states with multi-tabbed spreadsheets. Primary source verification meant searching databases, downloading PDFs, filing them, and recording them in the spreadsheet.

No standard way to record and track compliance-related issues

Responding to licensing discrepancies, patient complaints and other compliance-related issues caused the retail pharmacy operation team to corral people and capture facts, email updates, and keep checking in with employees to see if, when and how an incident was resolved. Reporting was unsystematic, resulting in management having little or no visibility without significant manual effort.

SECTYRHUB^® PLATFORM BENEFITS

“For anyone who’s considering LicenseTrak, I can say as a global user who oversees compliance this software puts licenses for pharmacies, pharmacists, DEAs, and other documents in one place and saves what would be weeks’ worth of work to track the same information in spreadsheets,” said the director of retail pharmacy operations for a Midwestern healthcare system.

Automated license renewal notifications and primary source verification

The healthcare system implemented LicenseTrak compliance software in 2021. Since then, the director and his team have relied on LicenseTrak to automatically keep tabs on the status of their licenses and DEA registrations for pharmacies, pharmacists, and technicians. They also use LicenseTrak AutoVer to automate primary source verification and OIG exclusion checking.

“Before LicenseTrak, we had multiple people, including me, managing our licenses and contracts through multiple avenues like spreadsheets,” added the pharmacy operations director. “Now, updates are in real time, with notifications, which saves so much work.”

LicenseTrak provides on-demand reports and emails reminders to staff up to three months in advance to renew licenses. LicenseTrak also sends an email to the director’s team if, for instance, a license is expiring for one of the health systems’ home-delivery pharmacies. The director says he also sees the email, so he knows his coworkers will handle the renewal, which means he isn’t spending time tracking the task.

Standardized incident tracking and reporting

If there’s an issue with a license or the Office of Inspector General (OIG), the system alerts the pharmacy director, his team, and, if relevant, a pharmacist and his or her manager. The team uses LicenseTrak’s Incident Management module to collect, review, investigate and resolve incident tickets. If, for example, there’s a prescription error, or a patient calls with a problem, LicenseTrak gives managers a way to document the issue, create a ticket, and disseminate a note. “We use that for continuous improvement and to know we’re taking care of a patient’s needs,” said a pharmacy technician.

According to the director, LicenseTrak’s incident tracking shows boards of pharmacy that a health system is carefully monitoring “how we handle a prescription error and work with an employee to make sure it doesn’t happen again. If the software shows an incident trend, we might adjust a process or training.”

Accelerated audit responsiveness

With LicenseTrak running around the clock, the health system’s pharmacy operations director says his team can easily show auditors that each employee’s licenses are up to date, education is on file, and any other attestations are in order. This, says the director, makes for a speedier process to gain accreditations from organizations like the Utilization Review Accreditation Commission (URAC) and Accreditation Commission for Health Care (ACHC).

When asked to quantify the savings, the director noted a manual process for tracking licenses, DEA documents, contracts and more could require a full-time person. Recently, an auditor from a state board of pharmacy visited the health system. With LicenseTrak, a pharmacy technician produced a report in less than two minutes showing active licenses, numbers of licenses and certifications.

“Once auditors see what kind of compliance system we have, they have a high level of confidence in us,” remarked the pharmacy technician.

For anyone who’s considering LicenseTrak, I can say as a global user who oversees compliance this software puts licenses for pharmacies, pharmacists, DEAs, and other documents in one place and saves what would be weeks’ worth of work to track the same information in spreadsheets.

Director of Retail Pharmacy Operations

Midwestern Healthcare System

SectyrHub Solution

• LicenseTrak License Management
• LicenseTrak AutoVer
• LicenseTrak Incident Management

Business Outcomes

• Standardization
• Accountability
• Visibility
• Efficiency