Troy Trygstad, PharmD, Talks Metrics in Community Care of North Carolina

PharmD, MBA, PhD, vice president of pharmacy programs at Community Care of North Carolina.

At Community Care of North Carolina, there is not only a focus on global performance metrics, but also the programs and metrics that will contribute to improving those global outcomes metrics, explained Troy Trygstad,

Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

How does Community Care of North Carolina determine on which quality metrics to focus?

For me one of the privileges of working with Community Care for 13-plus years is that there has been a focus on performance metrics that are more global with the overarching goal of "how do you reduce the cost of care through better health and ebtter health trajectories?" So what's fun and interesting and I think works really well is you have multiple providers who have shared metrics at a global level—so that might be a hospitalization rate, that might be emergency department (ED) rate, it might be what's the total cost of care for patients over a period of time—but at the same time the various actors that are involved in working together to get to that global outcome have metrics that can help them understand better how they're contributing to that global outcome.

For pharmacy, it's the privilege of having global outcomes be part of your performance. It's a privilege and it's something we should aspire to. We want to be able to be responsible on some level for hospitalization rates, ED rates, and global outcomes. But at the same time we want to make sure that from a pharmacy program perspective that those intermediate outcomes are outcomes that are of quality that lead to, we think, better global outcomes like adherence, comprehensive medication review quality and completion, responsiveness to referrals for curb-side consults for medication information, a compliance and persistency program, opioid overuse, and high-risk medications.

All of those types of performance measures are in support of the global measures. I would say that that is the privilege of working with Community Care of North Carolina as pharmacy director, is access to and responsibility for the global metrics, but also focusing on the areas of medication optimization programs and those metrics that indicate a high level of performance with medication optimization that we believe lead to those global outcome metrics.