Shelly Spiro, Executive Director at Pharmacy HIT Collaborative, spoke at PQA’s Data and Interoperability Advisory Group (DIAG) meeting on June 22. She discussed the importance of data standards for collecting and sharing information about pharmacist-provided patient care and services.

This blog provides an overview of Spirio’s presentation. You can view a recording of the DIAG meeting and read more about it in a PQA blog, which outlines PQA’s work to address data infrastructure, standards and interoperability.

Josh Howland, Vice President of Clinical Strategy at PioneerRX, provided a presentation on the Pharmacist eCare Plan (Plan) at PQA’s Data and Interoperability Advisory Group (DIAG) meeting on June 22.

This blog provides an overview of Howland’s presentation. You can view a recording of the DIAG meeting and read more about it in a PQA blog, which outlines PQA’s work to address data infrastructure, standards and interoperability. 

CPESN^® USA is the Community Pharmacy Enhanced Services Network. It is a clinically integrated network of community pharmacies that coordinates patient care with broader care teams to provide medication optimization activities and enhanced services for high-risk patients. 

At PQA’s Data and Interoperability Advisory Group (DIAG) meeting on June 22, Cody Clifton, Director of Practice Transformation at CPESN^® USA, shared the organization’s vision for a true “community pharmacy” network and ways to achieve what he believes is a model for pharmacies to become more in tune with patients’ care needs.

Data are the lifeblood of quality improvement.

Evaluating quality and comparing providers or organizations requires consistent, reliable data – and you need access to that data.

The 2020 PQA Leadership Summit was a one-day, online event, November 5, focused on the social determinants of health. The event engaged summit attendees to help PQA determine the scope and focus of an SDOH resource guide that PQA will develop in 2021. PQA is focused on SDOH interventions that hold promise for improving the quality of medication use and where pharmacists are best positioned to provide screening, evaluation and services.

You can now view select sessions from the summit.

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.

New organizations regularly join PQA throughout the year. This blog recognizes three organizations that have joined PQA since September:

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.

New organizations regularly join PQA throughout the year. This blog recognizes eight organizations that have joined PQA since July:

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.

This blog is one in a series sharing information about the program and the people involved – including professionals in the field, who are using it to expand and sharpen their quality improvement skills.

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.

Jain will participate in the opening discussion of the PQA Leadership Summit on Thursday, November 5. He’ll take part in a fireside chat with PQA CEO Laura Cranston on addressing the social determinants of health (SDOH) to improve quality for all patients. Jain’s session takes place at 11:00 a.m. ET. See the summit agenda for details.

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.

Below is a Q&A adapted from the podcast. You can learn more about the updates to PQA’s measure development process in this summary document.

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.

On March 12, 2020, Lucas Schulz, PharmD, BCIDP, an Infectious Diseases Clinical Coordinator at UW Health in Madison, Wisc., discussed the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program at University of Wisconsin Health.

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 inaugural fellow is Sabree Burbage, PharmD, MPH, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill dual-degree graduate. She began her fellowship at UNC earlier this year. 

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.

Jeff Newell, CEO of Pharmacy Quality Solutions (PQS), participated in a Q&A with PQA about HQIC on August 20. He shared his insights on the competition, what makes it special and some tips this year’s students may want to consider as they develop their proposals. PQS has sponsored HQIC since its creation in 2017.

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.

I want to highlight three important opportunities for our academic members to be engaged with PQA and take advantage of our member benefits as the 2020-21 academic year gets underway.

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:

• some history on the impetus for PQA’s work to develop pharmacy measures,  
• information on the draft plan and how you can provide comments, and
• what comes next in building out a pharmacy measure set.

PQA Member and Policymaker Interest in Pharmacy Measures

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.  

The program empowers healthcare professionals to lead quality improvement programs throughout our care system. Whether you’re focused on internal quality improvement or value-based payment models, you’ll gain valuable insights for delivering better results.

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.

For this year’s competition, PQA has developed three prompts to address pressing issues that have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis:

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:

• A pharmacist is not on-site;
• Pharmacists verify prescriptions for the telepharmacy through software solutions that provide a live video feed and images; and
• Pharmacists counsel patients via a live video call

Telepharmacy is most common and most needed in underserved areas. In some states, people must drive 50 miles to the nearest pharmacy to obtain medications or receive counseling. With telepharmacy, patients can receive care where they are and medications via delivery or mail. Another benefit is that it allows pharmacists to work remotely and lower their COVID-19 exposure risk.

There are more than 200 telepharmacies nationwide with 24 states permitting retail telepharmacy, though regulations vary drastically. Some of the rules and regulations governing telepharmacy include:

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.

The COVID crisis has multiplied the importance and urgency of access to high-quality care, especially among vulnerable populations and individuals with hypertension, heart disease, diabetes and other chronic conditions. These patients are more likely to suffer severe COVID-19 illness. Even before the pandemic, these conditions were leading drivers of healthcare costs, hospitalizations, premature deaths, disability and lost productivity.

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.  

What drew you to PQA and the Executive Fellowship program?