Decades of Innovation: A Conversation with Jim McLane, NaphCare Founder and Owner

This year, NaphCare celebrated a major milestone with the company’s 35-year anniversary. In 1989, our founder, Jim McLane, began providing pharmaceuticals to correctional facilities through his family’s drugstore in Birmingham, Alabama. In doing so, he recognized the growing need for quality medical care for individuals incarcerated in prisons and jails. This led to the creation of NaphCare and our mission – to improve and save lives.

What began as an opportunity for a family drugstore, has grown into a nationwide correctional healthcare company, serving more than 430 local, state and federal correctional facilities across 49 states through a variety of innovative services and solutions.

From its founding, NaphCare has worked to create solutions and drive change in correctional healthcare. Our story begins with seeing a need and providing a solution. Our company’s growth has always been closely tied to responding to what we see first-hand in correctional facilities and hear from our partners on the frontlines.

NaphCare stands apart in the correctional healthcare industry, in part, because of the stability of our ownership and leadership. 35 years ago, Jim McLane set the foundation for NaphCare, and today, he continues to direct his vision as Chairman of the Board with his son, Brad McLane, at his side as CEO.

Guiding NaphCare through growth and changes for more than three decades, McLane has a distinct perspective on correctional healthcare and NaphCare’s place within it.

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What was the foundation for NaphCare’s culture of patient-centered care?

I’m really proud of the philosophy of centering care on the patients’ needs rather than limiting care due to the environment or governmental constraints.

"When NaphCare began to expand from pharmacy services into the managed care market, my goal was to create a reasonable care model for the population in jails and prisons, who were often disadvantaged. Our philosophy was different from most other correctional health providers. With their original model, if you didn’t know about it, then you didn’t have to treat it, and you consequently saved money. NaphCare’s philosophy was to provide a proactive health and wellness model for our patients, shifting the emphasis from cost to patient care.

We have seen the success of this model in providing vital healthcare services to treat and stabilize patients from the beginning of their incarceration. The proactive focus not only reduces the number of medical emergencies that occur, it also creates a system that provides more and better care within the correctional facility. This community standard of care can be life changing for underserved patients who may be receiving treatment for the first time.

NaphCare has continued these intentional efforts to center patients at the heart of our mission – to improve and save lives in corrections through innovation and excellence.

I’m really proud of the philosophy of centering care on the patients’ needs rather than limiting care due to the environment or governmental constraints. At NaphCare, we use the word patients, rather than inmates, and create a caring model that is for them.

Our Proactive Care Model has become standard practice across all correctional facilities served by NaphCare, and we continue to research and develop technology to ensure the best patient outcomes possible."

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While NaphCare has moved into all facets of correctional healthcare, its roots in pharmaceutical services remain strong and have continued to grow. The company has gone from simply dispensing prescription medications to operating a fully-owned pharmacy, NaphCare Rx, inclusive of clinical pharmacy services.

How have you grown the company from its origin as a pharmacy?

"NaphCare Rx pharmacists have become an integrated, essential part of the clinical team. For example, our pharmacy does a great job of monitoring patients in detox programs for signs of severe illness or decompensation. This monitoring leads to lifesaving action and treatment for patients going through withdrawal, an issue that has become increasingly important in correctional healthcare.

As we better understand our patient population and see correctional systems become more complex, our team has expanded, and we have developed innovative services and technologies specifically for corrections. With the rapid rise of mental health and substance use disorders in the correctional population, we responded with industry-leading mental health initiatives and Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) programs that meet our patients and our partners where they are and provide answers for their most difficult challenges."

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When McLane founded NaphCare, his vision was to create a company that would provide compassionate and proactive care to a vulnerable and high-needs population. To accomplish this, he deliberately established NaphCare as a private company with sole ownership and no outside shareholders. In its 35^th year, NaphCare is poised to be a $1 billion company, while remaining family-owned and without engaging in mergers and acquisitions. This decision to remain closely held has afforded NaphCare the flexibility to invest in areas of need, to innovate and create solutions, and to grow at a sustainable pace.

How are you different from other large correctional health companies backed by investment banks?

"NaphCare has a tradition of being a stable, family-owned company. My son, Brad McLane, succeeded me as Chief Executive Officer in 2020, and I’m proud he is continuing NaphCare’s mission.

NaphCare has experienced tremendous growth over the past five years, but it has remained important that we keep a strategic approach for structured growth. We are cautious to avoid the pitfalls of growing too quickly at the expense of quality service. This means we’re selective in our partnerships to ensure the best fit, not only for us, but also for our clients. We identify potential partners based on many factors, including a mutual commitment to quality patient care.

Any company’s growth has its challenges. It’s our original spirit of innovation that has helped us to meet those, as well as a bit of divine inspiration. I attribute a lot of this success to God and to my faith in God. At times, a lot of the challenges looked insurmountable. Sometimes I would get up at night and write a notepad of ideas, and those challenges were where we built, through technology and people, a more efficient model.

As NaphCare grows, it’s my philosophy to reinvest earnings into people and resources, always being ready to meet future needs. You have to have people and resources trained and ready before you need them, or it’s kind of too late. My vision for building NaphCare includes developing staff and empowering them to take ownership of their area of specialty, giving them opportunities to try things and learn along the way.

It's amazing to me to look back on where we were and where we are now. I started NaphCare without any funding. Most banks didn’t want to fund correctional healthcare because it was so different; they didn’t have a model for it. Over time, it's kind of a mystery to a lot of people that the company has grown to this size without any investors."

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As for the future of correctional healthcare, McLane anticipates continued challenges with substance use disorder and mental health, as well as challenges attached to overcrowding as the incarcerated population grows and ages. Innovation remains at the core of NaphCare’s mission, and the company is well positioned to overcome the complexities of correctional healthcare into the future.

What are the biggest challenges in correctional healthcare today?

"There is a disproportionate number of people in correctional facilities with substance use disorders, so it’s an ongoing challenge to improve detox and withdrawal care. We created protocols for managing patients safely through drug and alcohol withdrawal, including our pioneering work treating opioid withdrawal.

Detox is always a challenge, but when fentanyl came in, it became exponentially more dangerous. We were always monitoring certain vital signs, but we really couldn’t figure out which changes were making people more ill and which weren’t. Now, we are doing research to find the factors that best determine if patients’ health is worsening during withdrawal so we can provide a solution. We continue to research, and we probably always will, because things are always changing.

We are also seeing, more and more, that correctional facilities are becoming default treatment centers for people with mental health conditions. The lack of readily available mental health services in the community, and a correctional system that is not prepared to handle these needs, has led to a revolving door for the same individuals with mental health conditions again and again.

We’re looking to break that cycle and to provide stabilizing mental health services for patients while they are in our care, with the hope that through our re-entry connections, they can receive treatment previously unavailable to them that makes a difference in their future.

At the end of the day, we are tasked with providing healthcare in an environment that is not designed to do so. That will remain a challenge, but NaphCare has been able to design and implement tools in the corrections environment that help us provide the care needed in a manner conducive to corrections."

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The NaphCare Charitable Foundation was established by McLane in 2011, initially to provide college scholarships to graduating high school students. The Foundation’s mission has since grown to encompass research and education vital to the delivery of correctional healthcare. They conduct critical scientific research to address and understand health trends among justice-involved populations. Coupled with a dedication to innovation, the Foundation is helping to develop state-of-the-art patient care technology that can set new standards in healthcare efficiency and effectiveness.

How is NaphCare preparing for the future of correctional healthcare?

"NaphCare is going to continue to innovate and use our technology to create efficiencies that help our team improve decision making and ultimately give our patients access to the best care available.

As we better understand our patient population and see correctional systems become more complex, we have developed innovative services and technologies specifically for corrections.

I’m proud of our establishment of the NaphCare Charitable Foundation. The research we’re doing aligns with the challenges we see in corrections, which are mental health and substance use.

The research being done by the Foundation is aiming to bring cutting-edge technology to improve decision making and make a difference in mental health care. We want to develop artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help decide if patients are improving or worsening mentally. With that, we could expand mental health care to more people; mental health care could be triaged on more levels, and we’d have more people to help care for this population. To me, that’s the most exciting thing we can do.

We are also at work to develop software and AI tools that improve patient access to care through an electronic platform available on tablets that lets the patient ask questions and directly communicate with a clinician about their medication, lab results, or any information that can empower them regarding their own health."

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How do you want people to think of NaphCare?

"A cut above. I want NaphCare to be a group of individuals that really care about the patient population they deliver healthcare to. They’re patients to us, regardless of what they’ve done, they’re our patients. This culture – this caring culture and this organization – has evolved so far since we started."