Quality measures are transforming how pharmacies deliver patient care. These standardized tools help track performance, identify areas for improvement, and ensure accountability in healthcare delivery. Pharmacy teams can monitor medication adherence for specific drug classes and enhance pharmacy services offered in their communities to focus on patient outcomes.

Measure Types

There are a couple of different types of measures:

Process Measures are typically related to what services are available or provided by the provider or health system. These will generally align with accepted recommendations for effective clinical practice.

Outcome Measures are directly related to the health status of patients. They are generally regarded as the “gold standard” for measuring quality. Ultimately, achieving the best outcome for the patient is the preferred result, and thus this type of measure is considered more integral to quality when compared to either Structural or Process measures.¹

Impacting Patient Care

Pharmacists can track key metrics on medication adherence and create improvement strategies to improve performance results. Deciding on which outcome measures matter the most to your pharmacy and developing an action plan geared towards patient interactions can lead to better patient outcomes. Review with your pharmacy team which outcome measures align with value-based care programs to set your performance goals for the year to impact patient care in your community.

Spotlight on PDC: A Critical Quality Metric

Proportion of Days Covered (PDC) has emerged as the gold standard for measuring medication adherence. This metric calculates the percentage of time patients have access to their prescribed medications. For most therapeutic categories, a PDC score of 80% or higher indicates optimal adherence, which is crucial for managing chronic conditions like diabetes, cholesterol, and hypertension.

Here’s how PDC works:

• Tracks prescription fill dates and days’ supply
• Measures continuous medication availability
• Accounts for medication changes within therapeutic classes
• Provides more accurate adherence data than traditional metrics

Practical Implementation

Modern pharmacies are leveraging technology and best practices to improve their quality measures:

• Weekly monitoring through quality management platforms like EQUIPP®
• Automated refill reminder systems
• Medication synchronization programs
• Regular patient education initiatives
• Proactive intervention for at-risk patients
• Team based care approach

The Future of Pharmacy Care

Quality measures are more than just metrics—they’re driving a fundamental shift toward patient-centered care. By setting specific measure performance goals, pharmacists are strengthening their role in the healthcare system and ensuring better outcomes for their patients.

Remember: Quality measures aren’t just about meeting standards—they’re about transforming patient behavior and ultimately patient care through data-driven decision-making and proactive intervention strategies. 

How Can EQUIPP Help?

EQUIPP is your pharmacy’s online tool that houses your pharmacy’s quality data and can help you measure your performance, track progress, and provide insight to patient care improvement. EQUIPP uses prescription and medical claims data to calculate quality measure scores and displays performance every month.

Your pharmacy team has the ability to sort and filter quality measures by relevant measure sets and dates in the EQUIPP platform to focus on the measures that matter most to your pharmacy. 

Pharmacies can track yearly performance goals and evaluate patient performance accurately. Each measure tile displays performance rates, goal percentage, patient outlier count, and number of patients within the measure. Clicking inside each measure offers benchmarks to graph how your pharmacy compares to others serving a health plan population and will list active quality improvement programs. Detailed information can be viewed for each patient within each measure or pharmacy teams may choose to look at an all encompassing view of all patients in the platform.  

This year, EQUIPP will host exciting new network programs focused on key medication-related quality measures, including PDC measures, and formulary adherence. Make sure you log in to EQUIPP weekly to prepare for these game-changing opportunities to improve patient care and maximize reimbursement. 

Need to schedule a consultation on how to better use EQUIPP? Request an EQUIPP Dashboard Demo today.

¹https://www.ahrq.gov/talkingquality/measures/types.html