Nancy McFarlane has never let anyone stop her from doing something that she knows she can. Her parents learned this when her older brother went off to kindergarten. She was so determined not to be left behind that she convinced her mother to find a preschool, and eventually an early kindergarten program, that would accept her. Later, in high school, McFarlane received the results of an aptitude test given to everyone in her class. Always a leader with a head for the sciences, McFarlane was stunned at what she read: “If the taker of this test is male, he should be a surgeon, a physician, an attorney, or an architect; if the taker of this test is female, she should be a nurse, a surgical assistant or a teacher.” This gender bias only motivated McFarlane to further prove herself.

As she entered college she thought about several career paths, with health care being one of her top choices. But as McFarlane calculated the time she would need to devote to school and what she saw as the inflexibility of the medical profession, she knew that being a doctor might not be the field she was looking for. “I wanted to travel,” she says. “And I knew that I would have a family someday. Would being a physician or a surgeon be conducive to raising a family? At that time I didn’t think so.”

Then she looked into pharmacy school. “It was still part of the health care profession; it still involved sciences and helping people; but it was a career that had many different options and would allow me the greatest flexibility.”

After earning a Bachelor of Science degree in pharmacy from Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Pharmacy at the Medical College of Virginia, McFarlane worked as both a retail and hospital pharmacist and also spent fifteen years working at Raleigh Community Hospital.

During this time, she and her husband – who is also a pharmacist – often discussed the absence of quality home health care for patients with acute medical needs. “It was something that got overlooked,” McFarlane says, “and it seemed like a key piece that was missing.” So she started thinking: how could she make a difference? She began doing her research, noting the steps that would be necessary to start her own business and taking appropriate measures to obtain the proper licensing and accurate marketing research to determine which home health care services could be best supported by such an endeavor. “It was always with an eye toward what would best benefit the patient,” she says. In 2002, the doors of MedPro Rx opened, and with just a handful of patients and two main therapies, hemophilia and IVIG, McFarlane began building a team of specialists that would work well with her and with her clients. In short, she started a second family.

Now the specialty infusion pharmacy she began in a 750 square-foot rented office has moved into a 6,000 square-foot custom space with 25 full-time employees and 45 contract nurses, with more than $40 million in expected revenue for 2008. And MedPro Rx is the proud sponsor of the Education is Power scholarship program, which is designed to ensure that students living with bleeding disorders such as hemophilia or von Willebrand Disease have the opportunity to receive the education necessary to obtain a job with the health insurance benefits they so desperately need. To date, the scholarship program has awarded more than $135,000 to students nationwide.

“If something is important to me, I’m pretty passionate about it,” McFarlane says. That’s why she has served the community in a variety of ways, from the Greystone HOA to Raleigh’s City Council. McFarlane believes that advocating for those around her is of the utmost importance. With three grown children, Katherine, Emily and Reynolds, McFarlane understands the importance of building a legacy for those who come behind. “People are depending on us to do the right thing every day,” she adds. “And right now the future looks bright for MedPro Rx.” Indeed, the question now is not whether it is going to expand, but how. “Every day, I get to help other mothers figure out how to best care for their children, helping to make their lives a little bit easier,” she says. “And I get to come to work with people I like, doing a job we love.”