Implementing MethCheck (New Initiatives, Part 2)

One of the gratifying things about the maturation of the OLS.Switch payment switch solution is that our clients have the confidence to come to us with challenging new point-of-sale payment initiatives.  Recently, we had one come our way that was quite unique.  It's called MethCheck, a new service from Appriss, Inc.  As you can tell from the service's name, this new initiative involves tracking the sale of Pseudophedrine.  This particular client is a large pharmacy chain, and they're being mandated by the state of Kentucky (surely only the first state of many to insist on this type of service) to implement it.  Here are some of Appriss' key talking points about the service:

• A single point of contact for managing compliance, ensuring pharmacies are submitting all required data to law enforcement.
• Tracks PSE purchase limits, any aggregate limits required by the law, box limits, pill counts, and acceptable forms of identification.
• Multi-state Compliance Manager (MSCM) keeps up to date with new PSE legislation.
• Communicates with state electronic PSE repositories allowing pharmacies to stay compliant without maintaining multiple interfaces.

Here's a nice diagram (see pop-up at left) from the Appriss site describing their solution.  OLS.Switch in this setting is just a piece of the orange box (as marked-up by me) in the upper-right corner.

My colleague Dave Bergert has an excellent post on his blog describing the nitty-gritty details of how we got this very non-standard message set flowing through our application.  Most notably, he relates how we used jPOS' FSDMsg class to get the job done in less than a week (see here for a post I did about Extracts - part of of my 'Real Systems Do Extracts' series that ends up spotlighting FSD). 

As a payment systems manager, the key takeaway here is that by implementing a jPOS-based solution, you become the go-to-guy (or gal) in your organization for anyone envisioning innovative uses of your payment systems infrastructure.  MethCheck is far afield from Debit/EBT, for example, but we achieved co-existence without jeopardizing what's already in place.  This is good news for you because we know the frustrations of those of you managing legacy payment systems.  You tell us it always seems to be "six months and major bucks" from your vendor for any initiative of this scale.  And for those of you outsourcing, well, best of luck getting some attention.