PQA has appointed 16 individuals to serve on a new Patient Advisory Council. The council will advise PQA on what matters most to patients, their families and caregivers as it relates to safe, effective and appropriate medication use.  The council also will provide input on strategies to meaningfully incorporate patient perspectives throughout PQA’s work to improve the quality of medication use and patient outcomes.  

PQA is celebrating its 20th year in 2026. In addition to special events at the 2026 PQA Annual Meeting in Baltimore, Md., May 12-14, PQA will recognize across the year the people, milestones and achievements that have defined the organization’s success. We also will look to the future and PQA’s continuing work to improve the quality of medication use. 

PQA is celebrating its 20th year in 2026. In addition to special events at the 2026 PQA Annual Meeting in Baltimore, Md., May 12-14, PQA will recognize across the year the people, milestones and achievements that have defined the organization’s success. We also will look to the future and PQA’s continuing work to improve the quality of medication use. 

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 Is Launching a Heart Failure Technical Expert Panel 

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.