PQA is a non-profit organization with 250 diverse members across healthcare. Our members include community and specialty pharmacy organizations, pharmacists and other healthcare providers, pharmacies, health plans, pharmacy benefit managers, life sciences, technology vendors, government agencies, health information technology partners, researchers, accrediting organizations and academia.
Medication Use Quality is an online PQA continuing education and certificate program for healthcare quality professionals, who are working to improve patient outcomes through safe and appropriate medication use. The program empowers professionals to understand and implement effective quality improvement programs across the healthcare industry.
Sachin Jain, MD, MBA, FACP, is President and CEO of SCAN Group and SCAN Health Plan. A nationally recognized innovator in health care, Jain joined SCAN this summer, where he is focused on pioneering new ways of improving quality and maintaining affordability for older adults.
Lisa Hines is PQA’s Vice President for Performance Measurement. She provides strategic direction for PQA’s performance measurement initiatives, including PQA’s approach to developing quality measures. Hines participated in a recent Quality Corner Show podcast to discuss PQA’s measure development process, which was recently updated. The podcast is hosted by Pharmacy Quality Solutions, and you can listen to the 20-minute podcast online.
The PQA Quality Forum Webinar is a regular, recurring series on healthcare quality topics with a focus on medication use and medication services. It is a forum for educating and engaging with PQA members and quality-focused healthcare professionals.
PQA, the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and Janssen Scientific Affairs have collaborated to jointly host a "Postdoctoral Fellowship in Real World Evidence, Population Health, and Quality Research." The two-year fellowship aims to prepare an individual for a career in healthcare quality-related outcomes research.
The PQA Healthcare Quality Innovation Challenge (HQIC) is an annual national collegiate competition where student teams present technology-enabled solutions to improve healthcare quality. With the support of a faculty or pharmacy professional mentor, participating student teams develop a business summary proposal for their solution to one of three prompts provided by PQA. The prompts for the 2020-21 academic year are focused on pandemics, mental health and the social determinants of health.
Our nation’s universities and academic institutions educate and train the healthcare quality workforce. More than 40 colleges and schools of pharmacy are PQA members and they are important partners in our work to advance medication use quality, especially in education.
PQA is developing a set of standard pharmacy performance measures that would be appropriate for pharmacy accountability. This work began in early 2019 in response to interest from our members and policymakers in standard measures to evaluate the quality of pharmacies and assess pharmacist-provided care and pharmacy-based services.
The focus of PQA’s current work is the Pharmacy Measure Development Action Plan. The draft plan was released August 6 and outlines steps for developing measure concepts that have been prioritized based on their feasibility and usability. PQA seeks comment on the plan now through August 28. The plan builds on work that resulted in three PQA-endorsed pharmacy performance measures.
This blog provides:
PQA offers a new online continuing education and certificate program on Medication Use Quality. The program provides advanced training on quality measurement and strategies to improve medication safety, adherence and appropriate use. Pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, nurses and physicians can earn 15 accredited continuing education hours through the program.
PQA with support from Pharmacy Quality Solutions is hosting the fourth annual Healthcare Quality Innovation Challenge, or HQIC. This competition encourages student pharmacists to work with fellow students from pharmacy, other health professions and business to develop innovative technology solutions to address the challenges facing pharmacy today.
The PQA Quality Forum Webinar is a regular, recurring series on healthcare quality topics with a focus on medication use and medication services. It is a forum for educating and engaging with PQA members and quality-focused healthcare professionals.
Interest in telehealth has skyrocketed with the COVID-19 and many advocates hope it will become a regular part of standard care, as social distancing orders continue and patients need to receive care where they are.
Adam Chesler, the director of Regulatory Affairs at Cardinal Health, was our presenter for the April 16, 2020, PQA Quality Forum Webinar. He provided an overview of telehealth with an emphasis on telepharmacy. The adoption of telepharmacy has varied from state to state, and Adam shared examples of effective pharmacy practice models that are leveraging technology to provide remote clinical services.
Telehealth originated in the late 1870s, with the use of telephones to reduce office visits. With the pandemic, it is expanding faster than ever. It is used for live video consultations and remote patient monitoring in primary care, specialty care (mental health, dermatology, cardiology, radiology, etc.) and specific disease states. Chesler believes the growing adoption of telehealth will be one of the biggest paradigm shifts in health care.
Chesler addressed telepharmacy, which is a subset of telehealth. The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy loosely defines telepharmacy as "the provision of pharmaceutical care through the use of telecommunications and information technologies to patients at a distance." Telepharmacy is just like traditional pharmacy in that it can be broken down to inpatient and outpatient settings. Inpatient telepharmacy includes remote order entry review and IV admixture, while outpatient includes retail pharmacy and remote counseling.
Chesler focused on retail telepharmacy, which is the most common model. Retail telepharmacy is provided through a brick-and-mortar location, just like any other pharmacy, but:
Pharmacist-provided care, as a part of patient-centered team-based care, has an important role to play in improving access to care, patient experiences and health outcomes.
Chris Kotschevar is the 2020-21 PQA Executive Fellow. He is a PharmD graduate from South Dakota State University College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Professions. Kotschevar joined PQA in June and has hit the ground running, helping to finalize and launch projects such as PQA’s Medication Use Quality continuing education and certificate program and the Healthcare Quality Innovation Challenge.
Statement by PQA CEO Laura Cranston, RPh
Every session from the 2020 PQA Annual Meeting is now available to be viewed on demand in PQA's new Education Center. Access to these recordings is available exclusively to individuals who registered to attend the meeting and PQA members.
The PQA Annual Meeting continues on May 28 with the first of five weekly one-hour online sessions. Each week features a new educational session and an innovation theater, which is a commercial showcase of an organization’s innovations, technology, services or research.
All sessions take place on the 2020 PQA Annual Meeting website. Use the same username and password you used to access the May 13-15 sessions. Log in to your meeting account or update your profile, if needed. If you have any trouble, please email [email protected].
You can still register for the meeting, if you have not previously registered. Below are the upcoming sessions. Visit the meeting's agenda page for updates.
The 2020 PQA Annual Meeting starts in two weeks on Wednesday, May 13. If you haven't made plans to join us, register today! All of the meeting sessions you would experience at our in-person meeting will be delivered online.
PQA announced on Monday that the National Quality Forum has endorsed three PQA risk-adjusted adherence measures. These measures are used in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Medicare Part D Star Ratings Program, and they evaluate adherence to medications for diabetes, hypertension and cholesterol.
The updated measures include a valid risk adjustment methodology for sociodemographic status factors. Accounting for these factors may impact patient health outcomes is important for ensuring that quality measures are applied fairly.
NQF recommends that performance-based measures be risk-adjusted for sociodemographic factors if there is scientific evidence that such factors affect the quality outcome measured. That recommendation is detailed in the Measure Developer Guidebook for Submitting Measures to NQF (PDF), which was last updated in September 2019. NQF’s rationale is supported in part by an earlier technical report: Risk Adjustment for Socioeconomic Status or Other Sociodemographic Factors (PDF).
CMS addressed this in the Announcement of Calendar Year (CY) 2021 Medicare Advantage (MA) Capitation Rates and Part C and Part D Payment Policies, which was released April 6. On pages 97-98, CMS discussed PQA’s measures and noted NQF’s recent endorsement, saying:
