Pharmacy Quality Alliance: Five Phase I demonstration projects: Descriptions and lessons learned

Abstract Objectives To describe the five Phase I Pharmacy Quality Alliance (PQA) demonstration projects and discuss lessons learned across the projects. Design Descriptive nonexperimental study. Setting United States from July 2008 to November 2009. Participants Community pharmacies from five states. Intervention Pharmacies viewed their performance scores on a reporting website and provided feedback. Main outcomes measures Pharmacy performance scores and pharmacist feedback about the scores and reporting websites. Results Considerable variation was found in the pharmacy performance scores. Some pharmacies did not have enough patients taking medications that were included in specific performance measures. Use of a website to report pharmacy performance was feasible across several different approaches. PQA has developed measures of pharmacy performance that can be used in programs intended to report pharmacy performance. Conclusion It is feasible to calculate pharmacy performance scores and create Web-based pharmacy performance reports to provide feedback to community pharmacists. Further development of pharmacy performance reporting should occur.