Understanding Quality Innovation at PQA

Pharmacy Times spoke with Melissa Castora-Binkley, PQA Senior Director of Research, about what PQA is doing with their research projects to focus more on pharmacy innovation.

Castora-Binkley: Yes. So at PQA, when we're talking about Quality Innovation, oftentimes, we're talking about pilot projects, because we're trying to figure out how to address something in a new way- it may not be well understood. And we really need to dig into it a little bit deeper. And we have to scale that a little bit smaller before we can take that into something bigger, so we have a couple of examples of this. One example that has already been done in the past relates to understanding how to better measure insulin persistence, so our PDC measures are proportion of days covered, those are very well known and much more straightforward. But when you're working in other areas, with like insulin, for example, you can't do it with the same methods that are already out there. And so one of our innovation projects is to really dive in to understand like, how can we make sure that we're measuring this appropriately using an evidence based and doing it in a feasible way? So we undertake such a project like that to understand the methodology and then it moves into our normal measure development cycle.