HONOLULU, June 2, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Kaiser Permanente Hawaii
has received the inaugural Pharmacy Quality Alliance (PQA) Quality
Award. This award recognizes Kaiser Permanente’s achievement
of a 5-star rating on the PQA measures of medication safety that
are included in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
(CMS) Star Rating Program.
“This award is truly unique because it uses publicly available
quality data from CMS,” said Laura Cranston, PQA’s Executive
Director. “Therefore, plans don’t have to be nominated, they simply
have to perform exceptionally well on transparent measures of
medication safety. Selections for this inaugural award were
made by examining the performance criteria of hundreds of Medicare
contracts.”
The plans were recognized for achieving the highest CMS rating
— 5-stars — on medication safety measures for High Risk
Medications and Diabetes Treatment. They also had an overall
CMS 4-star rating as a health plan. Nationally, only two
other health plans received this PQA recognition, including Kaiser
Permanente of Colorado. *
“We are honored to be one of only a few plans in the country to
be recognized by PQA, for medication and patient safety,” said
Barbara Kashiwabara, Kaiser Permanente Hawaii Director of
Pharmaceutical Services. “Our patient-centered model promotes
collaboration and improves communication between the care team and
the member, resulting in better care outcomes, increased patient
satisfaction, and increased patient safety.”
Kaiser Permanente Hawaii recently received the National
Committee for Quality Assurance’s (NCQA) Physician Practice
Connections® (PPC) Patient-Centered Medical Home™
Recognition for its integrated and coordinated care delivery
system, which supports quality, access, continuity of care, and
better patient involvement. The PCMH is a model of care that seeks
to strengthen physician-patient interaction with c
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