Here are five key notes:
1. Last week the Joint Commission published a list of 1,043 hospitals with Top Performer status in their performance last year. But, the organization will take next year to evaluate the national measurement environment.
2. The Joint Commission doesn’t like how the hospital metrics for quality are evolving, according to the report, with a particular eye toward the federal quality metrics. For 10 years, the measures were identical between CMS and the Joint Commission, which allowed hospitals to report the same data sets to both. But CMS is adding measures that the Joint Commission doesn’t require.
3. The Joint Commission President and CEO Mark Chassin, MD, feels some of the measures CMS added are a “poor gauge of clinical performance” because they don’t describe illness severity and complications.
4. CMS retired some of the chart-based measures, which The Joint Commission favors, that look at data manually abstracted from the patient’s electronic or paper records. CMS is pushing for electronic clinical quality measures based on computerized searches for descrete data in records to replace chart-based measures.
5. The Joint Commission hopes to unburden hospitals with reporting requirements. The number of hospitals named top performers this year was around 32 percent of all Joint Commission-accredited hospitals. But, the number of top performers declined 15 percent.
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