PQA Annual Meeting: Quality Emerges from the Pandemic, Focused on Access and Equity

The 2022 PQA Annual Meeting is May 3-5 at the Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Maryland. PQA is welcoming attendees in-person to the largest multidisciplinary gathering of health care quality professionals, who are focused on improving medication safety, adherence, and appropriate use.

Open to all health care professionals, the meeting is a top forum for learning best practices and emerging trends in medication services, pharmacist-provided care, and quality improvement initiatives.

“We are excited to welcome our members, sponsors and stakeholders back to an in-person annual meeting.” PQA CEO Micah Cost, PharmD, MS, said. “PQA members have continued to partner with us and each other throughout the pandemic to improve the quality of care, but we all miss the personal connections and innovative ideas that emerge when we learn, network and engage together face-to-face.”

The 2022 meeting will be Cost’s first in-person PQA Annual Meeting since he joined the organization in February 2021. He will open the meeting with an address on the status and future direction of PQA’s work to improve medication use quality. He will then moderate the first general session, which is focused on access. The meeting’s three other general sessions are focused on timely topics for the industry: quality beyond the pandemic, health equity and remote care.

“As we continue to navigate COVID-19-related challenges, it’s important to discuss the impact of the pandemic and the future of medication use quality,” PQA Education Director Amanda Ryan, PharmD, BCGP, CPHQ said. “That’s why value-based care, health equity and pharmacist-provided care are the guiding concepts for this year’s meeting.”

In addition to the thought-provoking general sessions, the meeting includes 13 breakout sessions that build on these themes and address quality improvement and care delivery issues with cross-cutting industry perspectives. Continuing pharmacy education credits will be available for many of these sessions.

Quality improvement education is a hallmark of PQA meetings. This year’s meeting features a pre-conference, half-day workshop on May 3, Medication Use Quality: A PQA Live CE Event. The workshop is accredited for four hours of pharmacist continuing education and will cover the role of quality measurement in healthcare, quality measurement development and implementation, what makes a good measure and measurement programs.

Across the meeting, there are numerous opportunities to build business relationships and forge new partnerships in quality. A series of special sessions and innovation theaters will showcase successful approaches, technologies and emerging opportunities to improve medication services.

Rounding out the program is the PQA Annual Meeting Poster Session, which is sponsored by Pharmacy Quality Solutions. There will be 24 posters presented and awards presented, including one for best student poster.

The Annual Meeting registration fee is a low $399 for PQA members, $99 for students and $999 for non-members, who register by April 4.

About the Author
Rachel Cormier is Communications Coordinator for the Pharmacy Quality Alliance, a national non-profit quality organization that was initially created by CMS as a public-private partnership in 2006.