2020–2025 Healthcare Safety & Quality Expert Committee Work Plan

Download Roster Observe a Meeting Upcoming Meetings

Focus Areas

  • Create and revise operational considerations for healthcare practitioners on handling COVID-19 vaccine to support COVID-19 vaccine programs.
  • Create and revise work for emerging issues, such as opioids, to enhance medication use, alleviate drug shortages, and improve safety.
  • Provide drug classification systems, such as the USP Medicare Model Guidelines and USP Drug Classification, built upon meaningful groupings of drugs tailored for stakeholder use. This includes but not limited to a tool to review and develop formularies, indicate characteristics of drugs (e.g. combination drug product), and provide comprehensive drug listings of certain drug classes.
  • Improve correct and safe use of quality medicine for patients. This includes solutions such as patient centered labeling of prescription containers to empower patient’s health literacy.

Expert Committee Charge

  • The Healthcare Safety and Quality Expert Committee will collaborate with stakeholders to develop, strengthen, revise, and promote adoption of healthcare quality standards or operational considerations that address quality and safety related to the use of medications and that are of value to patients and practitioners. The HSQ EC will focus on healthcare quality standards that address current public health needs, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the HSQ EC will continuously revise the USP Medicare Model Guidelines, USP Drug Classification, and other USP General Chapters.

Key Issues

  • COVID-19 Vaccine Handling Toolkit
  • USP Medicare Model Guidelines (USP MMG)
  • USP Drug Classification (USP DC)
  • Medication Safety
  • <1066> Physical Environments that Promote Safe Medication Use

Subgroups and Expert Panels

  • Healthcare Safety & Quality Expert Committee+ COVID-19 Vaccine Workgroup
  • Healthcare Safety & Quality Expert Committee+ Drug Supply Chain Resiliency Model
  • Medicare Model Guidelines (MMG) Subcommittee
  • USP Drug Classification (USP DC) Subcommittee
    • Expert advisors added; oncology
  • Safety Subcommittee

Standards-Development

  • The latest ballot results can be found here (results can be filtered by particular ECs).  
  • The status of Revisions, Deferrals, Cancellations, Commentary, and Index for each USP–NF and Supplement can be found here.

Learn more about the impact of this EC and its Associated Expert Bodies

•    COVID-19 Vaccine Handling Toolkit: Operational Considerations for Healthcare Practitioners
•    Medicare Model Guidelines
•    USP Drug Classification

Contact