Dr Matthew Pickering Discusses Development, Implementation of Quality Measures

The Pharmacy Quality Alliance (PQA) heavily relies on member organizations throughout the development and implementation of new quality measures, explained Matthew Pickering, PharmD, RPh, associate director of research and quality strategies at PQA.

Transcript

When the Pharmacy Quality Alliance is creating new measures, how does it work with its members?

PQA is a multistakeholder consensus-based entity and it was established in 2006 as a public-private partnership with CMS to develop quality measures to implement in the Medicare Part D benefit. And PQA has over 215 member organizations across a broad range of healthcare stakeholders. We actively engage our members throughout our measure development process. Including measurement generation.

Our development teams, our advisory groups, our technical expert panels consist of representatives across our broad member organizations. We rely heavily on their expertise and their insights. And it is very much instrumental for our measure development and implementation overall.

What is done to update or rotate out quality measures?

Measures endorsed under NQF, or the National Quality Forum, really have a review for an update every 3 years. And this update is intended to look at the performance of the measures to see if there is a gap that still exists. If the rates are still low or high depending on the measure specifications, then we may need to continue to implement that measure. Maybe there are guidelines that we need to change the eligible population or exclusions, such as certain age criteria, etc.

So those updates that's currently what goes on, and PQA does that, but in addition, we also update our national drug code lists, our NDCs. PQA obviously develops measures that are for medications and immunizations, and new medications come out quite frequently throughout the year. We need to update those drug code lists more frequently than every 3 years. So we do that every 6 months and we provide those new lists to the implementers who are actually using those measures.