Monitoring Community Pharmacist's Quality of Care: A feasibility study of using pharmacy claims data to assess performance

Table 3 Pharmacy-Specific Performance on Quality of Care Indicators

	Breadth/Frequency of Performance				Pharmacy-Specific Performance on *Quality of Care*Indicators
	Pharmacies dispensing 5 or more times per year		Dispensings per year (N = 54,045,097)		Indicator	Mean Annual Pharmacy-specific Rate of Inappropriate Dispensings
	N	% ^††	N	% ^‡‡		Mean	SD	Range
Medication Safety
Dispensings of benzodiazepines to seniors	1763	98.0	1,885,484	3.5	Seniors receiving flurazepam	4.3 ^§§	3.1	0-42.5
Dispensings of beta-blockers to patients taking SABA	1730	96.2	398,177	0.7	Patients receiving non-selective beta blockers and SABA	15.2 ***	11.1	0-100
Medication Effectiveness
Dispensings of SABA	1775	98.7	527,955	1.0	Patients over-using SABA	43.3 ^†††	12.4	0-91.6
Dispensing of anti-hypertensive medications	1793	99.7	10,838,986	20.1	Patients under-using hypertension medications	10.7 ^‡‡‡	4.0	0-70.0

^†† Of all pharmacies dispensing medications in our sample (1799)
^‡‡ Of all dispensings of medications to our population during 2002 (54,045,097)
^§§ Median annual dispensing rate for flurazepam is 4.0%, interquartile range 2.5%-5.7%
*** Median annual dispensing rate for SABA and non-selective beta-blockers is 14.2%, interquartile range 8.3%-20.4%
^††† Median annual dispensing rate for SABA over-use is 43.6%, interquartile range is 36.4%-50.7%
^‡‡‡ Median annual dispensing rate for HTN under-use is 10.2%, interquartile range is 8.4%-12.2%.

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