Joint Venture Delivers National Quality Measurement, Benchmarking, and Reporting Platform for Medication Use
The Pharmacy Quality Alliance (PQA) and CECity.com, Inc. (CECity) have launched Pharmacy Quality Solutions, Inc. (PQS), a joint venture created to deliver EQuIPPTM (Electronic Quality Improvement Platform for Plans and Pharmacies), the first national pharmacy quality measurement, benchmarking, and reporting platform for pharmacies and health plans. EQuIPPTM measures the quality of patient medication use, including non-adherence, and makes this measurement available and understandable. EQuIPPTM enables pharmacies and health plans to focus on improving the quality and safety of patient care delivered.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) brought attention to the quality of medication use through the Medicare Part D Star Ratings program which assesses plan performance against PQA measures. The role of appropriate medication use in a high-value healthcare system was reinforced by a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office that indicated a 1% increase in prescriptions filled by Medicare beneficiaries would save Medicare roughly one-fifth of 1 percent in expenditures, or approximately $1.1 billion annually.
The formation of PQS aligns PQA’s expertise and neutrality in measuring pharmacy performance with CECity’s award winning cloud platform for performance measurement and Big Data analytics. PQS provides pharmacies and health plans with a single trusted source for continuous performance measurement of PQA measures, including those used in Medicare Part D Stars, using dashboards to compare their performance with their peers in near real-time.
“Measuring performance is powerful in transforming the quality of the medication-use system, but only if pharmacies and health plans have access to standard dashboards that objectively reflect how they compare against meaningful quality measures,” said PQS President David Nau, PhD, RPh, CPHQ, FAPhA. “Our goal at PQS is to accelerate this transformation by making this service broadly available to all US pharmacies and health plans, so that we can rapidly move from measurement to improvement.”
Many of the nation’s health plans, as well as a significant number of community pharmacy organizations are part of the PQS national rollout of EQuIPPTM this year. By aggregating data from multiple health plans within one performance database, EQuIPPTM uniquely enables community pharmacies to evaluate their performance across a broad cohort of their patients. In addition, health plans are now able to view robust benchmarks on medication-use quality as well as efficiently and consistently evaluate quality across all pharmacies in their networks.
EQuIPPTM also provides tools and resources that pharmacies may use to improve their performance. These resources include support for continuous professional development and patient engagement. Performance improvement strategies provided by EQuIPPTM will help pharmacies close quality gaps, and adapt to value-driven healthcare.
PQS hits the market with significant contracts in place and will embark on a collaborative marketing effort to expand access and connectivity to the EQuIPPTM platform. Potential collaborators include health plans, pharmaceutical benefit managers (PBMs), electronic medical record (EMR) companies, registries, and other technology companies that are interested in assisting their provider networks through data aggregation and data exchange services.