National Association of Boards of Pharmacy selects FlexRule to increase business agility

NABP enforces relevant laws with FlexRule to protect public health

NABP is a non-profit association that protects the public health by assisting its member boards of pharmacy and offers programs that promote safe pharmacy practices for the benefit of consumers.

The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy faces many challenges in its mission to ensure compliance across all fifty states. Pharmacists' accreditation by the NABP is not just a case of ensuring that policies are adhered to but also of being compliant with complex laws and operational requirements subject to constant change. This is where FlexRule came in.

The first issue was that the rules were unclear, and we were certain that our understanding of those would vary as we moved along. Our approach to baking the solution into code would have set us significantly behind. The logic needed to solve and abstract the solution was a bit irregular across the 50 states of jurisdiction as well.

Praseed Thapparambil, CIO

FlexRule advanced decision management and automation platform enabled the NABP to model, execute and enforce rules based on each state's law. Now, the NABP can rapidly adapt to changes in the laws and regulations that govern pharmacists as FlexRule utilizes process orchestration and automation.

The ability to separate the rule sets per state along with modeling a rule processing structure helped us to build similar structures with variants – this enables us to attend to changing needs per state very easily. The rule definitions could also be isolated per state and hence could test these rules without affecting other rulesets.

Praseed Thapparambil, CIO, NABP

The NABP needed a highly adaptive solution that allowed the organization to deliver immediate value to its clients. As a top provider of decision management and automation solutions, as per Forrester AI decisioning landscape, Q1 2023, FlexRule efficiently translated complex business requirements into an easy-to-use solution while effectively handling day-to-day operational needs. An advanced authoring environment, single-click deployment, and a decisions-as-a-service model created a transparent development environment that simplified what would ordinarily have been a cumbersome development and maintenance effort involving a significant amount of IT and business resources.

Once we decided to look for rule engines, we needed a rule engine that is supported (unlike the open-source ones) and provides a good means to author, validate and deploy cleanly. FlexRule's IDE provided this. Also, most of the rule engines were java based. Our infrastructure was .NET and cloud-based, and we felt comfortable with FlexRule's friendliness to .NET environments. The ability by which we generate REST-based rule services out of FlexRule made us comfortable integrating with our service and mobile layers easily.

Praseed Thapparambil, CIO, NABP

One of the key challenges of operational excellence in any organization is increasing Business Agility. Business Agility is how fast your organization can react and responds to the market's condition changes.

In organizations dealing with laws and policies, increasing business ability is always challenging. We are pleased to enable and empower the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) to achieve this goal by digitizing the law and policies in their area.

Arash Aghlara, Founder, FlexRule