The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) plans to begin collecting anonymous patient-level data from hospitals in the second quarter of 2007. The data will be used to check the accuracy of the group's surveys, but won't be used directly for accreditation. Apparently, this isn't such a big deal, as 92 percent of accredited hospitals already provide such data to vendors of performance measurement systems, who then, in turn, pass the data on to JCAHO. And JCAHO won't be able to pick out individual hospitals from the data. But every time JCAHO sneezes, the industry takes notice, and this is no exception.

For more information on the data-collection plan:
- read this Modern Healthcare item [1] (sub. req.)
- see JCAHO's listing [2] of performance measurement systems vendors

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JCAHO overdue for reform? Report [4]