URAC’s New Specialty and Mail Service Pharmacy Accreditation Standards, v. 5.0: Part 2
(Operations and Infrastructure)
In October 2022, URAC unveiled the new Specialty Pharmacy and Mail Service Pharmacy Accreditation Programs, v. 5.0. In this video, the second of a series of eight videos, we explore what’s new as it relates to the Operations and Infrastructure module within those two accreditation programs.
In this educational video, IHS's CEO, Dr. Tom Goddard, sits down with the company's Chief Operating Officer and Senior Pharmacy Consultant, Dr. Jill Paslier, to discuss the changes in the URAC Specialty Pharmacy and Mail Service Pharmacy accreditation standards between version 4.0 and version 5.0.
Jill shares her insights and expertise on the updated standards, highlighting the key changes that impact specialty and mail service pharmacies seeking URAC accreditation. She also offers practical advice on how specialty pharmacies can ensure they meet the new requirements and maintain their accreditation status.
Whether you are a specialty or mail service pharmacy owner, operator, or clinician, this video is a must-watch. You'll gain valuable knowledge and a deeper understanding of the URAC Specialty Pharmacy and Mail Service Pharmacy accreditation standards and what it takes to achieve and maintain accreditation in today's healthcare landscape.
So, sit back, relax, and get ready to learn from the experts at IHS!
Topics covered include:
Operations and Infrastructure
Complying with Policies (P&Ps)
Job Descriptions
Staff Training
Ethics in Healthcare
Code of Conduct Staff
Performance Reviews
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (for Employees)
Transcription
[00:00:21.960] - Thomas Goddard
Let's move on to OPIN, the operations and infrastructure standards. Anything particular jump out as from the perspective of our pharmacy clients and prospective applicants? Sure.
[00:00:36.450] - Jill Paslier
Yeah, I'll share some of the new verbiage and changes first, and then I'll go through some of the concepts that have been removed. So one of the first standards is talking about your policies and procedures and maintenance, and there's just a little bit of updated verbiage with how you're going to keep track of these. You now need to keep a record of all revision dates, all affected dates, and all review dates. So not just the last dates, but the history of all your policies. So just making sure you're keeping that record.
[00:01:08.020] - Thomas Goddard
What was interesting to me about this revision is that if you go back two versions to the Pharm core standards that were a part of specialty pharmacy in the two or three-point era, there was a requirement that you record the date of the last revision, and then that went away. Any reference to revision went away in version 4.0, and so, URAC has restored that requirement for revision. But as you said accurately, all revision dates for the entire history of revisions, not just the most recent, now must be recorded. So that was an interesting little historical backdoor there, but please go ahead. Yeah.
[00:01:49.510] - Jill Paslier
So the next just small change is regarding the staff training. There's just a little bit of revised language in the ongoing training. So just making sure that you're targeting your ongoing training to maintain job knowledge related to the assigned roles and responsibilities.
[00:02:06.390] - Thomas Goddard
Yeah, that was the previous language since the beginning of time, it seems, has been around professional competence. And it seems to me that what URAC is doing here is saying general professional competence is not what URAC is interested in. We want to make sure that your ongoing training is about how to do this job better, not how to do some ancillary other part of your professional life better. So that seems notable, particularly as we think about the continuing education that historically has been appropriate evidence for this may not be appropriate anymore. It has to relate to this specific job.
[00:02:45.590] - Jill Paslier
Great. And then probably the biggest change and biggest new concept for the OPIN standards is regarding employee diversity, equity, and inclusion. So this is a brand new standard, new language that you may not be familiar with in URAC now. So URAC does define those terms and they give you a couple of ideas of how you can promote employee diversity, equity, inclusion. But you do have quite a bit of flexibility to decide, you know, what's going to work best for your organization and how you want to implement that.
[00:03:19.300] - Thomas Goddard
Yeah, from the perspective, it's good to put this in the context generally of brand new concepts. I think we first saw this standard in another program about a year and a half ago. And so even to URAC the whole DEI area for both employees and consumers is new. And so it's my belief, based on my quarter of a century in the land of URAC, that URAC reviewers and the Standards Committee will be watching closely what applicants for URAC accreditation do with this standard in order to better understand how they will interpret it going forward. So you do have a good bit of flexibility because the standards knew.
[00:04:06.400] - Jill Paslier
Those are really the main new topics and big changes in the OPIN-focused area. But I did want to go over some of the concepts that have been removed or changed in that way. So the first one I was going to mention was regarding pharmacies being held accountable for complying with their own policies. I'll maybe let Tom speak to this one since you have a little bit more experience.
[00:04:32.050] - Thomas Goddard
This is a long been interesting issue. It never was an issue. It would never originally was a part of any URAC standard. But what happened a dozen years ago, it seems, was that a reviewer interpretation became lodged in the formal URAC interpretation that essentially bootstrap point value elements into mandatory status if you missed enough of them. It was an anomaly in U. A. X. History for the last dozen years. So this is really a return to the way things were, at least in my mind, in the mind of our colleagues, before that anomalous change that got codified out of a strange set of circumstances. So this is essentially what is old is new and new is old. This is a return to the way things were probably 15 or more years ago.
[00:05:36.440] - Jill Paslier
Yep. And to clarify, you still need to adhere to your own policies, but non-adherence will basically get you out of compliance with that specific standard that the policy is related to, but it won't necessarily refer back to this open standard and make you out of compliance with that one regarding following your own policies.
[00:05:57.850] - Thomas Goddard
That was by many of us considered to be a double jeopardy thing. You violate one policy and standard over here, and then you have automatically violated another mandatory element over here, and that just seemed wrong. I don't think the Standards Committee ever intended to do that. Please go ahead.
[00:06:17.940] - Jill Paslier
All right. The next concept, just a slight change to this one, but regarding the job descriptions for staff qualifications, the concept has technically been removed, but still consider that some job roles, like the compliance officer and clinical staff, still need to have a job description. It may be listed in other standards that they need to have that, or you'll need to have that to show that they're meeting the qualifications and things like that. It's no longer a universal requirement, but many staff will probably still have a job description.
[00:06:52.300] - Thomas Goddard
Frankly, reviews have focused on clinical staff anyway. From the URAC perspective, this is a very minor change, worth noting, but I don't think it necessarily suggests that our pharmacy clients will want to be changing their policies about job descriptions. It's still probably a good idea to have them.
[00:07:11.210] - Jill Paslier
Sure. Another concept that was slightly changed and removed is just regarding some of the staff training requirements. The previous version just listed certain things that staff were required at training on ethics and health care, code of conduct, UREC standards, and thennow with the new standards, some of those specifics have been removed. Even regarding policy and procedure training in the OPIN standards, it's been removed, but technically you still need to disseminate and train them on the new and updated PNPs per another standard, so just keeping that in mind. Another thing that was removed is just in general, the staff member performance reviews. No longer mentioned at all. I think that's it for the OPIN standards.
[00:08:06.100] - Thomas Goddard
Yeah, that sounds good. Thank you so much for that.