Background
The Pharmacy Council Te Pou Whakamana Kaimatū o Aotearoa is a regulator of health professionals. Its purpose is to protect the public by ensuring pharmacists are competent and fit to practice. It seeks to demonstrate effective and proportionate regulation that is cost-effective and acceptable.
Alongside other key functions, the Pharmacy Council manages qualifications and registrations and sets competence standards for registered pharmacists. In 2020, the Pharmacy Council changed its requirements for professional recertification and needed a new platform where pharmacists could record evidence of their professional development activities to meet these revised annual recertification requirements.
Opportunity
Early in the project, the Pharmacy Council(external link) recognised that an accessible, contemporary online platform would play an important role in engaging pharmacists with the new requirements.
Solution
Before hiring Catalyst, the Pharmacy Council conducted a comprehensive analysis of its workflows and recertification process. The process enabled a streamlined solution design phase with Catalyst before development began.
The partnership between Catalyst and the Pharmacy Council was collaborative, using a positive, problem-solving approach. Plus, throughout the project, the teams prioritised the user experience for pharmacists.
Mahara, provided by Catalyst, was one of several products that the Pharmacy Council considered in a competitive procurement process. The Council was aware of its use in the healthcare sector throughout Aotearoa, New Zealand, including District Health Boards.
Mahara is an open source ePortfolio application that has been actively developed for 15 years, primarily in Aotearoa, New Zealand, by Catalyst, with contributions from the worldwide community. Maraha is used around the world in the education sector as well as in the workplace. Mahara supports organisations in creating different types of portfolios, making it a flexible portfolio platform for numerous learning, professional development, and evaluation scenarios.
From the outset, the Pharmacy Council was willing to share innovations from the MyRecert project in the spirit of open source. Over half of the development work for MyRecert was added to the Mahara codebase, becoming available to the entire Mahara community. These additions improved the usability of Mahara, supported the creation and management of portfolio templates, and added new integration points for external applications.
The Pharmacy Council is a small public sector organisation that must also work to ensure funds are used carefully. Open source enables it to balance cost-efficiency and innovation. Adaptive and incremental improvements work better for the organisation than cycles of wholesale replacement. Plus, open source solutions provide the organisation with ongoing adaptability of a proven product that can continue to be tailored to its needs.
A smooth roll-out was critical to engaging pharmacists with the new system. Catalyst delivered the project on time and on budget, and MyRecert went live on 1 April 2021, the start of the new recertification year. Feedback so far indicates that MyRecert has been straightforward to use.
Catalyst supported the Pharmacy Council in this project throughout the entire software development lifecycle. From planning to solution design, development of changes and new features to Mahara, graphic design of MyRecert to match the brand of Pharmacy Council, technical testing and peer review, deployment, and support through a workshop and short instructional videos.
