URAC has amassed a great deal of knowledge about what it takes to build a successful, high-quality pharmacy service. Redefine Health, URAC’s wholly-owned subsidiary and consulting arm, has been redesigned to facilitate this transfer of knowledge while maintaining the integrity of URAC’s accreditation process. Redefine Health represents URAC’s continued investment in the pharmacy community and signifies our effort to provide solutions to improve the quality of care patients receive.

Planning for the Telemed Leadership Forum 2019 is well underway. The website has launched with a preliminary agenda, speaker photos, and hotel information: https://telemed.org/

Selected staff participated in a second Kaizen Event in early August.  You may recall that “Kaizen” is a method to accelerate process improvement in any setting. This Kaizen focused on the specifics of the workflow for the Call Center Certification Program, e.g., when, where and how data is collected. To streamline the process, the team reviewed Parts 1 and 2 of the demographic questions currently required for completion by each applicant, with an eye toward eliminating duplicative questions or questions that have no bearing on the accreditation process. Of the 88 questions, the team recommended the elimination of all but 16. Of the remaining 16 questions, eight currently exist in SalesForce, four will be transmitted to AccreditNet, which then leaves only eight questions to be completed by the client. This streamlined approach translates to significant time savings for our clients!

I recently had the pleasure of taking a break from my normal day job to shadow a validation review. Given that my everyday tasks don’t really overlap with the review process, I was excited to get the chance to observe our reviewers in action. I regularly interact with product development, so I have a general understanding of how our standards are developed/revised, but this was a great opportunity to see our standards come to life, for lack of better words.

During July 2018 URAC Technology Services requested your feedback on our solutions and services.  Result of the survey included some interesting feedback:

The Monthly Review spotlights a different URACer each month in a Q&A. This month it's Larry Kroll, one of URAC's Business Development Executives.

Product Development is pleased to announce that the Community Pharmacy v2.0 revised accreditation is now available. To understand why Community Pharmacy was selected for revision in 2018, it is important to understand the state of the pharmacy industry.

URAC's new webinar portal, which is hosted by Digitell, Inc., will make registering for webinars and accessing on-demand content much easier for clients and URAC staff.

URAC has moved forward in its adoption of Lean Six Sigma with the completion of its first Kaizen Event! A Kaizen Event is a focused improvement project that can be accomplished in a short, dedicated timeframe.  It offers the opportunity for rapid improvement with a focus on identifying and eliminating waste in a process.

In June the President signed the VA MISSION Act into law which overhauled the Veterans Community Care Program. If you aren’t familiar, the community care program allows veterans to access private care outside of traditional U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) facilities. It was created in 2014 in response to the very public PR nightmare concerning extensive wait times and other instances of negligence.

We have all heard how important it is to save for retirement. A few comments may have included “Social Security might not be around when you retire” or “What do you want your life to look like when you retire?”  

The Monthly Review spotlights a different URACer each month in a Q&A. This month it's Diana Concepcion, one of URAC's Staff Accountants.