At the urging of CMS, The Joint Commission has been providing surveyors with extra training on procedures related to investigating possible immediate jeopardy situations, as well as the use of open-ended questions during interviews with hospital staff.
Sterile processing departments have and will continue to receive a lot of scrutiny during surveys. That is also where hospitals can see a lot of high-risk deficiencies or even a ruling of immediate threat to health or safety.
Which would you rather do? Tell someone in the C-suite the hospital is facing a CMS immediate jeopardy ruling because the staff was so overwhelmed by paper drug prescriptions after a ransomware attack shut down computer records that a 3-year-old patient was given five times the prescribed dosage...
