THE PURSUIT OF EVIDENCE-BASED MEDICINE IS NOW AT the core of the agenda for improving health care in the United States. All major quality measurement systems use science-based indicators of proper processes of care, such as the ORYX measures of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, the Health Employer Data and Information Sets measures of the National Committee on Q...

When, in 2008, the Joint Commission released its Sentinel Event Alert #38 regarding MRI safety, it joined the ACR's Guidance Document on MR Safe Practices as one of two radiology best-practice documents establishing MR safety protections. However, particularly for MR providers who held both modality-level accreditation from the ACR, and enterprise-level accreditation from the Joint Commission, ...

1. Distinguish between the voluntary accreditation agencies in terms of their scope of hospital and managed care accreditation services. 2. Assess the impact of accreditation changes and key initiatives (in the late 1980s and early 1990s) on the evolution of continuous quality improvement and outcomes management. 3. Assess how the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (J...

BACKGROUND Recent initiatives have focused on reducing door-to-balloon (DTB) times among patients with acute myocardial infarction undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention. However, DTB time is only one of several important AMI care processes. It is unclear whether quality efforts targeted to a single process will facilitate concomitant improvement in other quality measures and out...

Review the stated learning objectives of the CME articles and determine if these objectives match your individual learning needs. 2. Read the articles carefully. Do not neglect the tables and other illustrative materials, as they have been selected to enhance your knowledge and understanding. 3. The following quiz questions have been designed to provide a useful link between the CME articles in...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Primary stroke center (PSC) certification was established to identify hospitals providing evidence-based care for stroke patients. The numbers of PSCs certified by Joint Commission (JC), Healthcare Facilities Accreditation Program, Det Norske Veritas, and State-based agencies have significantly increased in the past decade. This study aimed to evaluate whether PSCs certif...

Policy initiatives on many fronts have converged to improve patient safety. A major tension that characterizes this process is the attempt to achieve a balance between learning and control in complex systems with technical, social, and organizational components. Efforts to improve learning are marked by better information flow, discovery, flexibility in thinking, embracing of failures as learni...

According to Dictionary.com (2011), abandon is defined as “to leave completely and finally.” A legal definition clarifies what abandonment means in the health care setting: “withdrawal from treatment of a patient without giving reasonable notice or providing a competent replacement” (USLegal.com, n.d.). One should note that according to this second definition, a health care professional can ind...

We examined the association between JCAHO accreditation of hospitals, those hospitals' quality of care, and survival among Medicare patients hospitalized for acute myocardial infarction. Hospitals not surveyed by JCAHO had, on average, lower quality (less likely to use aspirin, beta-blockers, and reperfusion therapy) and higher thirty-day mortality rates than did surveyed hospitals. However, th...

BACKGROUND The primary health care has notable effects on community health and accreditation is one of the appropriate evaluation methods that led to health system performance improvement, therefore, this study aims to developing of national accreditation model for rural health centers in Iran Health System. METHODS Firstly the suitable accreditation models selected to benchmarking worldwide ...