The Joint Commission Launches its Center for Transforming Healthcare

• 9/10/2009
• Author: Steven Berman
• Category: The Journal Blog
• 22312 Views
• 0 Comments
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Today, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., The Joint Commission announced its Center for Transforming Healthcare. In a letter sent to more than 16,000 accredited health care organizations or programs across the United States, Mark R. Chassin, M.D., M.P.P., M.P.H., President of The Joint Commission, stated, “The Center is developing solutions by using the same Robust Process Improvement™ (RPI) methods—including Lean Six Sigma and change management—that other industries have long relied on to improve quality, safety and efficiency.” The Center is intended to “provide knowledge and practices that will help transform health care into a high-reliability industry, with rates of adverse events and breakdowns in routine safety processes comparable to air travel or nuclear energy.”

In its first initiative, The Center is working with a group of hospitals and health systems in developing solutions to improve hand hygiene and reduce preventable health care–associated infections, with initiatives also planned for handoff communications and wrong site surgery. The Center will spread the lessons learned to the rest of the health care system. More specifically, it will provide assessment tools to measure the magnitude of the problem and the causes, as well as packaged interventions customized for the identified causes.

You can learn more about The Center and its initiatives at its Web site, http://www.centerfortransforminghealthcare.org. I invite Journal readers to share their own stories, either informally on the Blog or in an article, about their ongoing work in hand hygiene, handoff communications, wrong site surgery, and other important areas. (Please don’t miss the article by Mark Bittle and Susan LaMarash, “Engaging the Patient as Observer to Promote Hand Hygiene Compliance in Ambulatory Care,” which will shortly appear in the November issue.)