PQA-Convened Experts and Patients Prioritize Opportunities to Improve Cancer Care Quality
Recommendations to Improve the Quality of Oral Anticancer Medication Use is a new report from the PQA Quality Innovation and Research Initiative for Oncology. It shares the consensus-based recommendations of 23 national experts and patients, who were convened by PQA, to prioritize opportunities for improving the quality of oral anticancer medication (OAM) use.
Work on the initiative began in 2022 to identify research and measurement opportunities aimed at assessing the quality of OAM use. PQA invited patients with lived experience, OAM experts, and stakeholders from pharmacies, health plans, health care providers, biopharmaceutical companies, associations and academia to participate in three workshops between late 2022 and early 2023.
The prioritization process was informed by an expansive environmental scan conducted by PQA to identify OAM quality gaps and existing measures relevant to OAM care. The scan identified eight quality issues related to OAM use, and a lack of relevant OAM-related quality measures for health plan and pharmacy performance assessment.
A health plan performance measure to assess the degree to which patients take their OAMs as prescribed is the number one measurement priority according to the convened experts and patients.
The report describes the first phase of PQA’s oncology quality initiative, including the environmental scan, key takeaways from the workshops, conclusions and next steps.
PQA will begin research in 2024 to advance the health plan measure concept for adherence or persistence to OAMs. To advance this concept, PQA will:
- Compile available measure specifications for metrics currently used by organizations for internal assessments of adherence or persistence to OAMs.
- Identify methodologies to assess OAM adherence and persistence that may be appropriate for health plan performance measurement.
- Conduct initial feasibility and validity assessments of prioritized adherence or persistence methodologies.
The work is led by the PQA Quality Innovation and Research Center, a strategic initiative to advance progress in medication use quality and focus on clinical outcomes and provider contributions to care. Questions about the initiative can be sent to [email protected].
The first phase of this work was possible in part with support from Boehringer Ingelheim, EMD Serono, Hematology/Oncology Pharmacy Association, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis and Pfizer.