Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) news from FierceHealthcare
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Trend: Hospitals improving informed consent process
Increasingly, U.S. hospitals have begun to improve their process for obtaining informed consent from patients, in part due to research concluding that most patients don't read consent forms (or... Read more...
Joint Commission plans survey changes
The Joint Commission has begun the process of refining its survey process, changing the scoring process to make sure that surveyors are accurately measuring how closely healthcare organizations comply with the standards. The changes will apply to ambulatory healthcare, critical access and traditional hospitals, home care and office-based surgery programs. Joint Commission executives aren't being specific about the changes yet, but they did say that they're looking at tying standards to …
... Read more...MA hospital cuts errors 35%, gets $100,000
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts has awarded Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) $100,000 for its work in reducing errors on its obstetrics unit. Thanks to process and administrative changes, the department saw a substantial 35 percent drop in adverse events among patients between 1999 and 2005, and even more notably, a 50 percent decline among high-risk patients during the same period. BIDMC began changing the department's process of care after a newborn …
... Read more...Hospital care better for heart disease, pneumonia
A new analysis by The Joint Commission has concluded that hospitals have significantly improved the care they deliver for heart attacks, heart failure and pneumonia over the past few years. The report, which looked at how hospitals cared for these conditions between 2002 and 2005, found that hospitals steadily improved their performance in following guidelines for these conditions during this period. For example, it found that in 2005, ninety-six percent of heart attack patients got …
... Read more...ALSO NOTED: New Orleans officials wrangle over vouchers; FL hospitals defend quality; and much more...
> New Orleans health system leaders continue to wrangle over whether the poor should be cared for by charity hospitals or receive insurance vouchers. Article
> Two Florida hospitals which came out badly in JCAHO measures of heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia treatment are defending their performance, suggesting that the scores can be deceptive. …
... Read more...UnitedHealthcare offers racial disparity education
UnitedHealthcare (UHC) has signed on for an HHS program designed to help doctors treat ethnic minorities more effectively, adding its support to a growing industry movement focusing on differences in minority care. While UHC's participation is limited to Web efforts at the moment, the extent of their outreach efforts to doctors suggests that they're taking the issue seriously.
Working with the HHS Office of Minority Health (OMH), the health plan is launching a website which will …
JCAHO to study nursing care quality measures
Funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, JCAHO has announced plans to begin testing a comprehensive list of nursing-related performance measures. The idea behind the testing is to see whether the measures make sense, and should be used for national nursing quality improvement efforts. The measures, which are endorsed by the National Quality Forum, focus on hospital-based nursing, address patient outcomes, nursing-centered care interventions and process issues that tend …
... Read more...JCAHO asks clinicians to speak plain English
Experts agree that if the industry is to keep lowering the rate of medical errors and unsafe care, patients will have to monitor their own care and speak up when it appears that something's wrong. But if professional caregivers can't speak in a jargon-free manner--addressing the patient at their level of literacy or respect cultural differences--that's virtually impossible. That's why JCAHO is launching what it calls a "call to …
... Read more...Patients urged to guard against care errors
According to research by the Harvard School of Public Health, about 34 percent of patients say they or their families have been affected by a medical error. For people with chronic illnesses, the percentage rises to a frightening 50 percent. This may be, in part, because doctors aren't spending a lot of time listening to patients, interrupting after about 23 seconds, studies suggest. Realistically, it also comes from the inevitable ongoing process errors that occur during the routine …
... Read more...ALSO NOTED: NC mental healthcare in the red; Cleveland Clinic plans $163M hospital expansion; and much more...
> A new report says that North Carolina is so behind in providing mental health services that it will need more than $500 million for the next five years to meet its obligations. Article
> The Cleveland Clinic is sinking $163 million into its Hillcrest Hospital campus expansion over the next five years, the most it's ever spent on one of its nine community hospitals. …
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