Since hospital dental departments currently are regulated by the same quality assurance guidelines as other hospital departments, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations now requires that dental departments review and evaluate the quality of care they deliver. Criteria mapping is an audit method that builds logic and decision making into this review process. This metho...

Too many of our nation's hospitals have been become complacent over disaster preparedness. They develop a document to meet a licensure requirement or a joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations standard. The language is minimal and when the document is exercised, only a few portions (personnel recall and mass casualty, in particular) are tested. It would benefit hospitals to...

Recently, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) implemented new national core measures, including tobacco-cessation interventions for patients hospitalized because of pneumonia or other pulmonary-related illnesses, acute myocardial infarction, or heart failure. All interventions performed for such patients must be documented in the patient's chart. Because th...

Reporting of laboratory critical values has become an issue of national attention as illustrated by recent guidelines described in the National Patient Safety Goals of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. Herein, we report the results of an analysis of 37,503 consecutive laboratory critical values at our institution, a large urban academic medical center. We evalua...

To the Editor In their interesting report, Friedman et al 1 state that " informed consent for blood transfusion is a requirement of the Joint Commission. " This is not correct. The reference they cite in support of this statment 2 includes the comment that " the final measures were recommended by the TAP (Technical Advisory Panel) in November 2010 and submitted to the National Quality Forum (NQ...

This overview is intended to summarize the challenges and decisions that impacted the development and testing of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) heart failure (HF) and community acquired pneumonia (CAP) hospital core measures, as well as to provide the clinical rationale that supported the measures that were originally contained within the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organ...

We searched PubMed/Medline databases for records including the following phrases “awareness under general anesthesia,” “BIS monitoring,” “BIS monitoring prevents awareness under general anesthesia,” “prevention of awareness during general anesthesia,” and “general anesthesia complications.” The search was limited only to human studies in English and Polish from last 12 years (2004–2016). While ...

INTRODUCTION Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) and Total Quality Management (TQM) are gaining acceptance in many of today’s health care delivery systems. Hospitals have incorporated this philosophy both as a means of enhancing quality of patient care through continuous improvement and to improve efficiency and effectiveness of management, but also to satisfy the Joint Commission on Accredita...

Accreditation within the medical arena is longstanding throughout history. In 1910, the Joint Commission was established with the primary mission of continuously improving healthcare for the public by evaluating healthcare organisations and inspiring them to excel in providing safe and effective treatment of the highest quality and value. In the past 100 years, accreditation has extended to med...

● Have the radiation dose produced by the CT imaging equipment verified annually by a medical physicist. To more firmly align its accreditation requirements with these legislative changes, The Joint Commission added elements of performance (EPs) to Environment of Care (EC) Standard EC.02.04.03 and Provision of Care, Treatment, and Services (PC) Standard PC.01.02.15 for the ambulatory care, crit...