How Do You Measure Health Care Quality?

There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that we should only pay for quality health care, but how do you measure it?

This issue was examined in an article published on January 30, 2015, in The Wall Street Journal, which describes how “The Obama Administration’s goal of tying more Medicare payments to the quality—not the quantity—of health care by 2018 has intensified the debate over how ‘quality’ is defined and measured.”

The article then details how care quality may be measured, as well as providers’ reactions to those measurements. The effort to tie payments to quality that is being rolled out in federal health care programs—which many private programs will probably follow—is going to include pharmacy, too.

The Pharmacy Quality Alliance has been working on appropriate quality measures for pharmacy. I suggest that you follow these developments, because when they are implemented, it will be a real game changer for pharmacy as we know it.