The Joint Commission's annual report on quality and safety recognized 620 hospitals as top performers for achieving excellence on quality care metrics, a more than 50 percent increase from last year's list, The Joint Commission announced today.
Despite adding 215 hospitals, notable academic medical centers still failed to make the Joint Commission's honor roll. Just as in the inaugural list last fall, compliance scores at teaching hospitals missed the mark.
For example, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan and UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco remained absent, Kaiser Health News reported.
The longer list stemmed, in part, from the agency this year including psychiatric hospitals in the calculation, which added 43 freestanding psychiatric hospitals or hospitals with inpatient psychiatric units as top performers, noted KHN.
As part of making the list, hospitals scored 95 percent for every accountability measure they reported, which include heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, surgical care and children's asthma care, as well as new measures for inpatient psychiatric services, venous thromboembolism (VTE) care and stroke care during 2011.
The Joint Commission hopes the top-performers list will encourage better quality care among accredited hospitals. However, other hospital rankings like U.S. News & World Report's "America's Best Hospitals" and HealthGrades' "Best Hospitals" have come under fire, with critics blasting them as misleading and incomplete.
For more:
- here's the Joint Commission announcement and report
- read the KHN article