PQA Is Launching a Heart Failure Technical Expert Panel 

In 2026, the Pharmacy Quality Alliance (PQA) marks an extraordinary milestone: 20 years of advancing medication use quality and improving patient outcomes across the United States.  

PQA convenes two standing technical expert panels – the Quality Metrics Expert Panel (QMEP) and Measure Update Panel (MUP) – to support PQA’s systematic, transparent, and consensus-based process for measure development and maintenance.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services strengthened its commitment to monitoring patient safety with the addition of several PQA safety measures to the 2027 Part D Star Ratings (Polypharmacy: Use of Multiple Anticholinergic Medications in Older Adults [POLY-ACH], and Concurrent Use of Opioids and Benzodiazepines [COB]) and Display Page (Polypharmacy: Use of Multiple CNS-Active Medications in Older Adults [POLY-CNS]). A new publication in the Journal of Managed Care and Specialty Pharmacy provides insights into the quality issues associated with CNS-active medication polypharmacy suggesting that the rate of CNS-active polypharmacy is higher among enrollees of the Medicare Part D Medication Therapy Management (MTM) program compared to the general Medicare Fee-For-Service population. This finding isn’t surprising given the eligibility and targeting criteria for the Part D MTM program.  

Early in the measure life cycle, PQA solicits multi-stakeholder input to evaluate and prioritize health plan measure concepts for future development. To support measure conceptualization in 2025, PQA convened a Measure Concept Advisory Group (MCAG) and conducted a public comment period to inform future measure development, with a particular focus on addressing meaningful gaps in medication use quality while ensuring measure concepts are evidence-based and usable in real-world settings. 

A research partnership between PQA, Merck, and the University of Mississippi focused on three PQA adherence measures to continue to monitor their impact.