All Pharmacies are not the Same: Community Pharmacy Quality Ratings Matter
When someone searches for a restaurant online, ratings play a key role in their eventual dining choice. Yelp, Google Maps, and other search portals provide ratings made by other foodies, helping diners pick the best option. Leveraging a similar rating system within the pharmacy world offers benefits to patients, primary care providers, and the pharmacies as well.
An informed patient is able to use a rating system to find the best pharmacy in their area. Unlike online restaurant ratings, the metrics used for analyzing a pharmacy’s capabilities and overall quality must be based on sound medical standards. However, the final rating must also be easy for patients to understand, like a letter rating or numeric score.
A Community Pharmacy Rating System for Patients
Seguridad developed a community pharmacy rating system currently in use at pharmacies across the country. It uses a collection of well-considered quality measures to calculate a letter grade easily understood by patients. Notably, this rating system, Choose My Pharmacy™, effectively serves as the national standard for pharmacy quality in the United States.
Community pharmacy ratings help patients choose the right one for their healthcare needs.
Medicare provides different healthcare measurement systems for a wide variety of medical providers. However, they unfortunately failed to include pharmacies in this collection of metrics. Seguridad addresses this critical gap with Choose My Pharmacy™.
Choose My Pharmacy focuses on Patient Safety
The core set of quality measures used in Seguridad’s rating system focuses on patient safety. The system leverages data generated by the community pharmacies using Choose My Pharmacy™. This secure and anonymized data is sent to Seguridad on a regular basis, with a quarterly letter grade calculated for each participating pharmacy.
How do the measures define a pharmacy’s overall quality? As an example, one measure used in the rating system identifies whether a pharmacy records and retains weight data for each patient. Why is this important? Many prescription drugs have dosing amounts that are based on a patient’s weight. Failure to track this data at the pharmacy level might lead to incorrect dosing and a subsequent adverse health event.
In addition to a letter grade, the quarterly report also includes details on the results for each health measure. The pharmacy report card also provides a comparison to the network average among participating pharmacies. In short, it offers patients the meaningful information to choose the right pharmacy for their healthcare needs. This is an important factor as community pharmacies increasingly provide more direct care services to customers.
Learning more about Choose My Pharmacy™
If you want more detailed information on Choose My Pharmacy™ and community pharmacy quality, check out this article from Pharmacy Times. Seguridad leadership, including CEO Jake Galdo, COO Tripp Logan, and Director of Strategic Operations, Richard Logan, all contributed to its authorship. While the article covers a complex topic, it offers helpful insights into the importance of pharmacy quality and the efficacy of the Choose My Pharmacy™ rating system.
