The APMS® PSO provides the tools and the resources to help you collect, track, and analyze medication errors and “near misses” so that you can apply corrective actions, new process steps, or tweaks to your workflow. When you know where to apply corrective actions, your pharmacy can run more smoothly and efficiently, you save time and money, and decrease operational costs. A partnership with APMS® not only helps you improve patient care, but also helps you comply with insurance, state, federal and accreditation CQI/QA requirements.
How We Help Pharmacies
Mistakes happen. A doctor writes the wrong dosage, a clerk transposes a digit, or a technician pulls the wrong drug. Fortunately, your final check catches almost all these missteps, and no one is hurt. But still, you wonder if there is more you can do to make sure an error causes harm to one of your patients.
Our Pharmacy Quality Commitment (PQC+™) program makes it easy for our pharmacies to learn from past mistakes, adopt best practices, and share lessons learned from other pharmacies like them. Joining our PSO allows pharmacies to track and study patient safety data without fear of exposure.
The Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005 – Protection for QA Work
The Alliance for Patient Medication Safety® has been a federally listed Patient Safety Organization (PSO), since 2008. We encourage a strong culture of safety in community pharmacy and provide tools and resources for the improvement of workflow processes to reduce medication errors, improve medication use, and minimize patient risk.
The 2005 Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act provided for the creation of patient safety organizations or PSOs. The intention of the law is to encourage healthcare organizations to collect, report, study errors and subsequently share those findings to improve patient safety and care. Pharmacists can learn information about trends and best practices associated with dispensing errors with absolute confidentiality. Participating pharmacy members can track and study patient safety data without fear of exposure. The Act allows providers to study patient safety data, conduct quality assurance/peer review meetings and perform root cause analysis without fear of exposing that work. Pharmacies within our PSO can learn from aggregate data from similar regional chain and independent pharmacies.
APMS® was created by the National Alliance for State Pharmacy Associations (NASPA) in 2005 and is a 501 C 3 supporting organization of NASPA.