An Oklahoma Health System’s Road to Dual-Specialty Pharmacy Accreditation
Operations & Management
JULY 30, 2026
By Gina Shaw
For many patients with cancer and other complex conditions across southwest Oklahoma, filling a specialty prescription has often meant waiting for a package to arrive by mail. That changed when the specialty pharmacy at Memorial Health System of Southwest Oklahoma, in Lawton, earned accreditation from both the Utilization Review Accreditation Commission (URAC) and the Accreditation Commission for Health Care (ACHC).
Memorial Health’s Great Plains specialty pharmacy became URAC-accredited in July 2024 at the 5.0 standard—a level held by only two other pharmacies in the state—and added ACHC accreditation in January 2025, becoming the fifth dual-accredited pharmacy in Oklahoma. The health system worked with Clearway Health, a specialty pharmacy management company, to prepare for the reviews and to build a roadmap for staying ready.
URAC and ACHC are two of the most recognized accreditors in specialty pharmacy, and increasingly, payors and manufacturers alike expect pharmacies to pursue accreditation with both groups. “They both cover specialty pharmacy very well, but in a complementary way. URAC is very focused on how you clinically manage the patient,” said Christopher Wilson, PharmD, MBA, the vice president of pharmacy solutions at Clearway Health. “How do we do something that is deeply clinical and focused on improving the patient’s quality of life and disease progression? ACHC has more of a tilt toward the nuts and bolts—how do you deliver the care reliably, safely and efficiently.”
For Cheryl Hale, DPh, the director of pharmacy services at Memorial Health, pursuing both accreditations was a deliberate strategy. “We wanted the largest possible impact for our community and our patients,” she said. “Different payors and manufacturers have different accreditation requirements, so by holding both URAC and ACHC, we opened the door to more payors and medications than either would have done alone.”
Carrying both also sends a message to patients: “We’re committed to the highest quality of care, and we’re willing to prove it and go those extra steps,” Dr. Hale said.
Health systems are the natural home for specialty pharmacy, Dr. Wilson said. “You are generating all of the patient’s clinical information. You’ve got the provider interaction, you’ve got the laboratory results, all these pieces of the puzzle that live in the health system world.” Going outside of that model and sending patients to other sites for prescription fulfillment “chops off the pharmaceutical care and gives it to a third party,” Dr. Wilson said. “That doesn’t seem very logical.”
Outside the health system, he added, the market is largely saturated with pharmacies owned by pharmacy benefit managers, leaving health systems as the segment with the most room to grow.
Health systems often are more familiar with accreditation through The Joint Commission, said Luanne Sojka, PharmD, BCPS, CPPS, the manager of accreditation at Clearway Health. “URAC and ACHC accreditation have some similarities to The Joint Commission, but it can feel like a different language, very unique to the care provided within the specialty pharmacy practice,” she said. “If that’s new for a health system, the accreditation process can be overwhelming and require a lot of resources.”
Dr. Hale initially considered managing the effort internally. As a director who also oversees inpatient and retail pharmacy, however, she soon realized that “the accreditation process was a full-time discipline, and I didn’t have the time or the expertise to dedicate to it.”
She went to multiple conferences and listened to representatives from much larger institutions discuss their accreditation journeys. “I thought, well, they were able to do all this on their own because they have the pharmacy school and residents to help carry the load. And then I found out that they actually had a partner to get their project up and going too.”
What she did not want was a distant vendor. “I didn’t want out-of-state or mail-order, big-box, chain experience,” Dr. Hale said. “I didn’t want somebody coming from a totally different area of the country, with a different dialect, who wouldn’t be able to communicate well with my 85-year-old farmer.” Keeping the team local let the pharmacy hold onto personal relationships with patients while building the infrastructure accreditation requires.
‘A Significant Investment’ in Time and Money
Dr. Hale stressed that the accreditation process is neither cheap nor quick. “It’s a significant investment of your time, money, resources and energy, and I don’t think any of us would pretend otherwise,” she said. Much of the work on policies, procedures and the URAC 5.0 requirements fell to a dedicated specialty pharmacy manager working with Clearway Health, while Dr. Hale met with the team monthly to track progress.
The team holds itself to a teach-back standard. “We have a goal that the patient should be able to speak back to the pharmacist in their own words how the medication should be taken, what their side effects are going to be, and what their goals of therapy are,” she said.
Accreditation is also not a one-time event; reaccreditation readiness is its own discipline. Clearway Health’s ongoing role centers on what Dr. Sojka called an annual accreditation compliance visit. “We want to create a continuous readiness state, so the pharmacy is ready for reaccreditation at any time,” she said.
The most obvious return on investment has been access. “The accreditations opened up several limited-distribution medications and allowed us to fill for more payors than before,” Dr. Hale said. “Before, we were excluded from payor networks simply because we weren’t an accredited specialty pharmacy. Now our cancer patients have the option of getting their oral chemotherapy right here, around the corner from where they got their diagnosis, instead of waiting for it in the mail.”
From the manufacturer’s vantage point, Dr. Wilson said, accreditation means reliability. “A manufacturer has spent billions bringing a product to market, and that only works if the patient experience mirrors the clinical trial,” he said. “You can’t just be a pharmacy and hand out these [specialty] medications. They’re complex, they can cause side effects, they’re expensive, and none of these stakeholders want the weak link in the chain to be the dispensing.”
For pharmacy directors and other health system pharmacy leaders weighing the same investment, Dr. Hale’s advice is to start by thinking about patients’ needs. “We didn’t start with a spreadsheet. We started with our patients and how we could better serve them,” she said. “When you frame it around what is actually important to your patients—the ability to pick up their treatments from a pharmacist instead of waiting for it to hit their porch in a box—the math really changes. For us, it was absolutely worth it, and I believe we’d do it again tomorrow.”
The sources reported no relevant financial disclosures.