| Plexus Consulting Group | Success Stories | ||
| The Pharmacy Technician Certification Board (PTCB) |
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Plexus Consulting Group, LLC |
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Vital Stats: The Pharmacy Technician Certification Board (PTCB) has over 80,00
certified technicians within the United States. The Challenge | The Solution | The Process | Unintended Consequences | Unforseen Benefits | Measurements & Results | Lessons Learned
How to build a comprehensive certification database to manage program and industry growth? Market trends point toward a growing population, increasing prescription
requirements, a shortage of pharmacists and increased awareness of
patient care and safety issues. As a result, the PTCB's goal is to
benefit pharmacists and ultimately their patients by providing a strong
support layer of competent, professional pharmacy technicians to manage
growing volumes of non-judgmental work generated for pharmacists by
the healthcare industry. PTCB's challenge was to develop a database
and business model to manage the explosive growth in demand for certified
pharmacy technicians. To expedite certification of pharmacy technicians to meet rapidly growing market needs. Since the inception of the 6-year old organization, PTCB has certified
80,300 of an estimated 201,000 pharmacy technicians working in the
United States. Its certification program growth continues to be dramatic,
and the certification database and strategic partnership model that
PTCB has used to manage this growth has helped to define a new professional
role for the pharmacy technician. By capturing and providing essential
data about pharmacy technicians applying for certification, PTCB has
created a comprehensive database that defined this new profession
and provides valuable information to employers in the healthcare industry. "The process involved the following steps:
Since the process was understaffed, it proved challenging to find the right people to implement the project. Information technology vendors helped to provide support and validation for PTCB's staff team, which comprised of 8 full time professionals with full-time clerical support. Outsourcing was vital to the success of this effort. PTCB outsourced two-thirds of the work, including certification test construction, logistics and IT-related tasks. Surveys
In the process of looking at Y2K issues in 1998, PTCB developed a proprietary certification database on a Microsoft Access platform, and subsequently migrated the database to Sequel 7 to accommodate the tremendous certification program growth. The database was designed to capture:
Facilitating the Certification Process To resolve this problem and create a more efficient process, PTCB worked with its strategic partners to pioneer online registration and:
Allows individual applications via the website
PTCB's certification database provides strategic partners with "value added" information that can significantly improve their business prospects by helping them to understand the details of industry market segmentation. While the database helps employers to verify the credentials of potential employees, PTCB takes steps to safeguard and mask the data to prevent abuse. Re-certification "The need to stay 5-6 steps ahead of our clients keeps us creative." PTCB's ongoing challenge is to continue refining the certification
database system to accommodate the customized requirements of each
stakeholder, whose organizational cultures are radically different.
PTCB is very partner focused, and continually re-evaluates the relevance
of data to each strategic partner. By continually improving the cycle
from conception to implementation to refinement to re-implementation
for each strategic partner, PTCB is able to adapt specialized procedures
and lessons from each situation, expanding its knowledge base and
enhancing the quality of the database. By capturing this certification-related data, PTCB and its strategic partners were able to:
Since the development of online registration, PTCB has increased its certification rate from 20 percent to 80 percent, providing better and more highly certified technicians to serve the pharmacology profession. Moreover, by collaborating effectively with employers, PTCB is able to precision-target industry requirements and to boost the volume of quality professionals to meet burgeoning healthcare needs. "Don't approach the project with blinders on." PTCB was careful to secure feedback from knowledgeable IT support personnel and did a significant amount of research on the web before plunging headlong into database development. Every six months, PTCB talks to all of its vendors, including banks, insurance companies, consultants and IT specialists about the need of their clients and leading edge-customers. To improve its efficiency, PTCB uses vendors as conduits to other associations and for-profits to avoid limiting its knowledge base. A major key to program success is the ability to manage successful relationships with strategic partners. The critical success factors involved are:
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