Joint Commission Helps Hospitals Meet Future Performance Measurement Expectations

• 6/25/2010
• Author: Meghan Anderson
• Category: Benchmark Blog
• 8254 Views
• 0 Comments
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To help hospitals prepare for performance measurement in the new health care environment, The Joint Commission is categorizing its performance measures into accountability and non-accountability measures. This approach places more emphasis on an organization’s performance on accountability measures – quality measures that meet four criteria designed to identify measures that produce the greatest positive impact on patient outcomes when hospitals demonstrate improvement. Non-accountability measures (for example, providing smoking cessation advice) are more suitable for secondary uses, such as exploration or learning within individual health care organizations, and are good advice in terms of appropriate patient care. The majority of The Joint Commission’s core measures are accountability measures; there are six non-accountability measures.

Increasingly, performance measure data are being used for many purposes and, moving forward, will be the basis for much of Medicare’s Value-Based Purchasing program and for public reporting purposes. The Joint Commission’s new approach will help hospitals prepare for the increasing reliance on attaining high performance on quality measures.

Currently, Joint Commission–accredited hospitals deliver evidence-based treatment of heart attack 96% of the time and they are making similar—and greater—gains in evidence-based treatment of heart failure, pneumonia, and in surgery. The need to “raise the bar” and advance performance measures that truly improve patient outcomes has been top-of-mind for accredited hospitals and The Joint Commission for some time.

To learn more about accountability measures, read the June 23, 2010 online issue of the New England Journal of Medicine that features an article, “Accountability Measures: Using Measurement to Promote Quality Improvement,” for which Mark R. Chassin, M.D., M.P.P, M.P.H., president of The Joint Commission, was the lead author.

What are your thoughts on The Joint Commission’s new categorizations? Do you feel this will help organizations?