The EQUIPP^® dashboard will be updating on February 15, 2022, with performance results for the complete 2021 year! Which means now is the perfect time to review this data with your pharmacy team, create a new action plan that will focus your efforts for this 2022 calendar year. One of the latest episodes of the Quality Corner Podcast (S3 EP5) focuses on how your pharmacy should develop an action plan for EQUIPP^® in 2022:

Question: Why is it important for pharmacies to view their full calendar year results from the 2021 calendar year?  

Answer:  It’s important to review year end performance to reflect on achievements to establish a starting point and understand what new goals can be achieved. As pharmacies think about what next steps they can take to optimize patient care efforts and improve performance on quality measures, it’s important to acknowledge where things ended in 2021 to better organize how to begin the new year. This would be an ideal time to communicate with the pharmacy staff on what worked, what didn’t work, and have a detailed discussion on the best approach to 2022.

Question:  Is this a process that pharmacies should take every year at this time?

Answer: Absolutely. The purpose of setting a goal in any scenario is to accomplish some type of improvement. We encourage pharmacies to keep quality improvement  efforts consistent monthly when logging into EQUIPP^®, and this is another tactic in the process that should be done annually. There may be new performance programs your pharmacy is eligible for, or you could be offering new vaccination services to patients which would require a reevaluation of the approach. I recommend using the P.A.C.E. yourself improvement process we mentioned in 2021’s year-end webinar. Pharmacies should plan, act, check and engage with staff to achieve their goals.

Question:  WHERE do pharmacies find the most important details? Where should they look or navigate in EQUIPP®?

Answer: There are a few places to review in EQUIPP^®. First, remember to change your view on the main screen of the performance dashboard to Year-to-Date for 2021 details. This will show overall how you performed on core adherence measures and other measures that may be included in payer programs applicable to your pharmacy. In that same regard, viewing your QIP table within analyze performance allows you the opportunity to see your performance in those specific programs and evaluate if you met your pharmacy’s goal. The outlier page will also be an optimal place to review which patients did not meet the intent of the measure and could be a good place to start creating goals for the new year.

Question: Pharmacists and their teams spend a lot of time on patient interventions – but they might not always see performance scores improve. What’s the important lesson or takeaway for pharmacists that have been completing MTM cases for patients or that have been enrolling patients in refill programs, like med sync?

Answer:  Pharmacists providing interventions and completing MTM cases are important, however, change in performance scores on quality measures happens over time. Each patient will have their own clock that is based on their initial prescription fill date from when the pharmacy claim was adjudicated. The health plan must continue to see those fills for the patient’s performance to be positively attributed to the applicable measure. Over time, pharmacists may begin to see a change in their performance metrics as they continue to remain persistent.

This time to be reflective and intentional with changes in how pharmacists provide patient care can have long term benefits – of course for the patients, but this can also help the pharmacists in how they provide services AND how it is conducted in workflow.

To listen to the full episode of “Developing Your 2022 EQUIPP^® Action Plan,” check out the original article.