PQA Annual Meeting - Pharmacy Quality Alliance Annual Meeting

The Pharmacy Quality Alliance Annual Meeting highlighted social determinants of health, oral oncolytics, and screening opportunities.

Aligning community pharmacy interventions with top-down findings, payers’ population health priorities, and identified unmet needs can help develop a sustainable pathway.

As value-based health care models become more widespread, these types of interventions will be important to demonstrate the value of pharmacist-embedded HSSPs.

Future potential directions include measuring the impact of clinical pharmacist interventions on referral utility, disease-specific clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction, medication adherence, and absenteeism.

Properly training staff and gaining stakeholder buy-in are crucial steps to successfully designing and launching a program to screen and address health-related social needs.

We're rowing in the same direction as pharmacists, so that what is of interest to a payer, PBMs and pharmacies, according to PQA.

Just making sure that everybody has a seat at the table is the most important thing at PQA.

PQA wants to expand the types of services covered and report on the results of the current examples that are profiled in the SDOH guide.

The challenges in pharmacy are really a lack of standardization.

Pharmacists are ideally positioned to screen patients for estimation aids and then refer them to services.

Pharmacists are an important touch point for PQA, and they're starting small and thinking big.

PQA is also committed to national goals related to HIV and reducing HIV ending the epidemic.

PQA is focused on actually testing the feasibility and implementation of some of these measures as concepts.

One example that has already been done in the past relates to understanding how to better measure insulin persistence.

Issues like medication access and transportation cost all impact a patient's ability to have access to medications and use them safely and effectively.

It's really opening up the world for pharmacists to develop more meaningful measures and get at patient reported and clinical outcome measures.

It's extremely important for pharmacists to be involved in helping care for people who have HIV.

Pharmacy performance measures allow the pharmacy to be more engaged in the patient's care that focuses on outcomes.

There are many initiatives that are going on at PQA right now that are related to health equity.

The guide is an opportunity to just catalog what else is going on there to kind of be an inspiration for expansion of services.

The goals of the pharmacy measures are ultimately to be used in value based arrangements.

There are other courses available on HIV, but PQA's surveys the 13 medication related quality measures out there for HIV.

The term "value" is used interchangeably across our healthcare system.

One of PQA's quantitative research projects that they are working on now is looking at how medication adherence is related to outcomes.

PQA's program is focused on quality measurement and improving the safe and appropriate use of medications.

PQA is working on developing measures specifically for evaluating pharmacy performance measurement.

The SDOH resource guide focuses on services specific to the pharmacy and pharmacists.

The PQA team is diverse, and they have expertise in quantitative research as well as quality.

These measures are specified for application to pharmacies, as opposed to health plan measures.

The growth of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic has caused health care providers to search for innovative solutions for harder to reach patient populations.