We’ve created a blog section on pharmacyquality.com for posts related to managing performance information and other general quality-related topics. If you have common questions or suggested topics, we’d love to hear from you! We hope you enjoy the topics and possibly even learn a thing or two about performance measurement, EQuIPPTM, or the broad topic of pharmacy quality.
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When to Improve Adherence
You don’t improve adherence in a day – you improve adherence daily! This simple truth caused a dramatic change in my mindset around patient adherence. The secret for pharmacists is that we need to be focused on improving adherence routinely, as in every day, not once in a while or every so often! The next question then quickly becomes visible: How do you do it? Let me share with you one strategy you can use. It involves your OUTLIERS. As a brief review, you can find your OUTLIERS by logging into EQuIPP™ and selecting the performance dashboard or by clicking on the "MY PROGRAMS" tab. You...
How to Better Educate Your Patients: The Pharmacist Vs. The Internet
The education of proper medication use should be a top priority for pharmacists in their efforts to improve the quality of patient care. Since pharmacists are medication experts on the front lines of health, actively working to help their patients live healthy lives, they should also be ready to combat misinformation and disseminate accurate information to their patients. Where else are patients getting their information? The Internet. The internet is a wealth of information and potential misinformation for your patients. Yes, even your patient demographic of 65+ are actively online. Here’s a few stats reported by Pew Research Center’s Internet/Broadband Fact Sheet:1 “Roughly...
How to Create an Adherence Game Plan
You have probably heard the old sports adage “Offense wins games, but defense wins championships.” This can be applied to pharmacy as well. Pharmacies need to have offensive and defensive strategies or what could also be called proactive and reactive strategies. Let’s first look at the defensive or reactive strategies. Defense exists to stop or at least slow down whomever or whatever the opposing team is trying to do. In the world of performance contracts, let’s look specifically at the team of non-adherence. Non-adherence to three classes of medication: cholesterol (statins), renin-angiotensin system antagonists (RASA), and non-insulin antidiabetic products. So, our defensive strategy...
Performance and Pharmacy Quality Related Conversations
In a further effort to support our customers, Pharmacy Quality Solutions would like to expand communications on the quality of medication use and performance improvement. To satisfy this need, PQS is establishing a new section on its website known as the “Quality Corner”. The Quality Corner will provide educational articles in blog format, answer common quality measurement questions and share general thoughts and reflections about quality improvement within the pharmacy profession. Expect a variety of topics to be covered including tackling medication adherence, exploring and using the EQuIPP™ platform, reaching performance goals and understanding performance results. We will also dive into...