The Joint Commission (TJC) is revising five elements of performance (EP) following a CMS review of TJC’s EP Review Project for its Leadership (LD) chapter. The revisions go into effect starting January 1, and deal with the deeming in hospitals and critical access hospitals to better align with...
Briefings on Accreditation & Quality - Volume 29, Issue 12
There was a far-ranging medication management discussion held at The Joint Commission’s 2019 Executive Briefings this September. Led by Robert Campbell, PharmD, a pharmacist with The Joint Commission’s Standards Interpretation Group, the panel covered everything from medication...
Briefings on Accreditation & Quality - Volume 29, Issue 12
On October 10, Hurricane Michael made landfall in Florida, forcing at least two hospitals to evacuate all of their patients after their buildings sustained heavy damage. On the same day, The Joint Commission (TJC) published a new Emergency Management Health Care Environment Checklist on its...
Briefings on Accreditation & Quality - Volume 29, Issue 12
CMS wants to put a stronger spotlight on times when TJC and other AOs fail to find patient safety problems later discovered by CMS survey teams conducting performance checks referred to as validation surveys.
To do so, CMS has created a website that provides a graphic about the disparity...
Briefings on Accreditation & Quality - Volume 29, Issue 12
A cohort of about 150 physician groups sent a letter both commending and criticizing the Trump administration's planned changes to the 2019 physician fee schedule.
With a span of providers reaching almost half the country, the Dignity Health system kicked off its Human Trafficking Response (HTR) Program in 2014 with the intent of identifying and helping trafficking victims. Within a year, it identified at least 31 people with high or moderate indicators...
Communication can be one of the hardest skills for anyone to master. Yet in healthcare, miscommunication can pose grave challenges to patient safety and care quality. A 2016 malpractice study conducted by CRICO Strategies, a division of the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical...
To boost patient safety and physician efficiency, Seattle Children's Hospital adopted overlapping emergency room shifts for physicians and achieved a dramatic reduction in patient handoffs, recent research shows.
Suicide prevention and ligature risk was a major topic at The Joint Commission (TJC)’s 2019 Executive Briefings this September. Many attendees had questions on risk assessments, physical environment updates, and suicide screening of patients.
