What Opportunities do Pharmacists Have to Influence Quality Measures?

At the 12th annual meeting of the Pharmacy Quality Alliance held recently in Baltimore, Maryland, several speakers shared ideas on converting patient input into meaningful performance measures.

In this interview with Pharmacy Times, Timothy Weippert, RPh, who is the Chief Operations Officer for Thrifty White Pharmacy, a regional pharmacy chain headquartered in Plymouth, Minnesota comprised of 96 corporate locations and 85-plus affiliated pharmacies in rural communities and cities throughout the Midwest, discusses the role that pharmacists play in quality measures. He discussed this issue, and the role of pharmacy in long term care transitions at the meeting.

Transcript:

In terms of quality measures there's a lot of different avenues we can develop and continue to develop. We obviously have significant problems in the United States with opioids, that's a whole topic, along with other different disease state management scenarios, along with new arenas such as specialty pharmacy work where measures can be developed. We can grow in these spaces.The face-to-face time that patients need and the pharmacists need to make these measures significant bring things such as adherence to these measures to the highest of standards so that patient outcomes can be realized, and savings in terms of health care costs.I think quality measures are really the starting point, if you bring patients into pharmacys today and you work on the various quality measures that are brought in front of us be it from a health plan standpoint... if they take that and expand it to services that pharmacists can do today, thigns such as CMRs, MTMs, immunizations, health care screenings, you can really expand the breadth of what you can do today with patient engagement.