"Our industry is moving from transactional relationships to strategic alliances that can share risks and resources at the same time for long-term patient impact; therefore, access planning must begin earlier in the product lifecycle with multistakeholder engagement," said McKesson's Natalie Bedford. She shares insights from a recent NASP panel on how to combat growing patient access barriers with industrywide collaboration.

Addressing Medication Adherence    
Andrew Maiorini discusses PerformRx’s patient-driven approaches for addressing medication nonadherence in U.S. communities. With an amplified presence in their respective communities, he explained why pharmacists have the ability to truly tap into patient challenges and address them head-on with simple yet powerful conversations.

Expanding Immunization Access Through Pharmacy  
NCPA's Independent Rx Forum podcast highlights how pharmacy-provided immunization services have evolved, the critical role pharmacists play in vaccine access, and why these services continue to matter for public health. "Our goal has always been to make vaccines accessible and easy, so we try to reduce those barriers."

Better Adherence Lowers Payer Medical Costs  

Using administrative claims data from Optum’s de-identified Clinformatics® Data Mart Database, a research project between PQA, Merck, and the University of Mississippi examined Medicare Advantage enrollees who were taking either diabetes, renin-angiotensin system antagonist (RASA), or statin medications. 

Findings suggest the average patient-level adherence rate was between 84%-89% across the three medication classes using a modified version of the proportion of days covered (PDC) methodology.  More information about this project can be found through open access at BMC Health Services Research.

It is ever important to remember that applying quality measures to research, such as done in this project, often requires changes to the measure specifications to fit the research design. If you would like to discuss using PQA measures in your research, please contact [email protected].

Your Next Engagement Opportunities

Network, Learn and Collaborate with PQA