PQA, Tufts awarded AARP patient care grant
This year’s AARP Quality Measures Innovation Grant has been awarded to Pharmacy Quality Alliance (PQA) and Tufts Medical Center. Each of the companies will receive a grant of $150,000 along with access to OptumLabs’ data assets to develop innovative quality health measures that address important gaps in diabetes and cancer care.
The Pharmacy Quality Alliance in collaboration with the University of Maryland, proposed a patient safety and outcome which measures the frequency of hospital and/or emergency room visits. Specifically, ones that are due to the misfortune of anti-hyperglycemic medications among those with diabetes. This is a measure AARP strongly believes in given the high prevalence of diabetes among mid-life and older adults.
Tufts Medical Center collaborated with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Dana-Farber Cancer institute, to propose a patient safety measuring aiming towards reducing medical errors and care-related injuries, particularly ones among high-risk and vulnerable people. The proposal will identify a group of “trigger” events in the electronic medical record which indicates potential adverse events or medical errors.
AARP and OptumLabs began the Quality Measures Innovation grant program in 2016, which sponsors projects aimed at developing and/or testing health measures to improve patient care.