The seven new members include:

health care executive John A. Babiarz, COO, ARAMARK Healthcare, a public member on the board; L.D. Britt, M.D., M.P.H., FACS, appointed by the American College of Surgeons; Albert J. Osbahr, III, M.D., and Stephen R. Permut, M.D., J.D., both appointed by the American Medical Association; David Pryor, M.D., appointed by the American Hospital Association; and David Henry Perrott, D.D.S., M.D., M.B.A., FACS, appointed by the American Dental Association. In addition, Joan M. Doyle, R.N., M.S.N., M.B.A., executive director, Penn Home Care and Hospice Services, University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS), Philadelphia, will represent the home care field as a Commissioner. Current behavioral health care field representative Michael F. Hogan, Ph.D., commissioner, New York State Office of Mental Health, and current long term care field representative Connie S. March, R.N., M.S.N., president and CEO, Provena Life Connections will become full voting members of the Board.

The Joint Commission also announced the re-appointment of Isabel Hoverman, M.D., MACP, as 2012 chair of the Board of Commissioners. Gerald Shea will serve again as vice chair.

Previously, the field representatives voted on Board committees, but not at the full Board.

Full details of the program and fact sheets here.

Nash Hospitals received hospital accreditation for services offered at Nash Health Care. The Hospice program at Nash General Hospital earned Home Care accreditation as a result of its Joint Commission survey.

The accreditation is for three years.

Nash Health Care is a nonprofit hospital authority comprised of five licensed hospitals totaling 403 beds: Nash General Hospital, Nash Day Hospital, the Bryant T. Aldridge Rehabilitation Center, Community Hospital and Coastal Plain Hospital.

Founded in 1951, The Joint Commission (formerly the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations) is the nation’s oldest and largest standards-setting and accrediting body in health care and considered the world leader in evaluating quality and safety of care delivered in all types of healthcare settings. JC accredits more than 19,000 health care organizations and programs in the United States. TJC standards are developed with input from doctors, nurses, medical directors, providers, subject matter experts, consumers, government agencies and employers.

For example, in a 2004 study that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Landrigan and colleagues found that interns in intensive-care units who worked 30-hour shifts on a regular basis made five times as many diagnostic errors and 36% more serious medical errors as those who worked no more than 16 consecutive hours at a time.

The Joint Commission’s alert is the latest in a series labeled to draw attention to the issue of fatigue-related safety risks. In June 2010, 26 experts in medicine, sleep science and patient safety gathered at a conference at Harvard Medical School to discuss ways to implement the Institute of Medicine’s 2009 recommendations for resident work hours.

The results of that conference were published in a NSS-19649-implementing-the-2009-institute-of-medicine-recommendations-_062111, which included guidance on imposing work-hour limits and redesigning the handoff process.

The ratings used 22 measures in five categories — heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, surgical care, and children’s asthma — but not all hospitals report their results on all measures to the commission. To be included on the list of 405 top hospitals, a hospital had to meet each of the measures it reports 95 percent of the time.

Download the full report here.

“Making a Difference — Ambulatory Care Accreditation” will provide hands-on education from Joint Commission experts. They will provide insight to standards, the survey process, ideas for continuous patient safety efforts, and solutions for successfully maintaining compliance. The conference will feature expert presentations from several organizations, including the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and will focus on electronic health records, telemedicine and infection control for the ambulatory care setting.

A pre-conference seminar on October 3, 2011, will spotlight The Joint Commission’s new option for ambulatory care organizations — designation as a Primary Care Medical Home (PCMH). This session will offer information about the survey process and other related activities associated with achieving the PCMH designation.

Register online at http://www.jcrinc.com .

Photo courtesy of Flickr and http://www.flickr.com/photos/ibison4/

In the alert, the Oak Park, Ill.-based health care accreditation group suggested a handful of strategies, such as swapping X-ray based scans for ultrasound or MRI, when appropriate, and adhering to dose-lowering guidelines put out by the American College of Radiology and other medical societies.

Recommendations from Joint commission include:

• Meeting ALARA — “as low as reasonably achievable” — recommendations for keeping dose low without sacrificing image quality.
• Following the ACR’s Image Gently (for children) and Image Wisely (for adults) dose-awareness campaigns.
• Investing in new, dose-reducing equipment.

JC also supports a national dose registry to track patient radiation exposure, urges manufacturers to include dosage safeguards in new devices and it backs “stricter regulations” to monitor self-referred imaging studies.

Image courtesy of Flickr and http://www.flickr.com/photos/herby_fr/

Founded in 1951, The Joint Commission is dedicated to continuously improving the safety and quality of the nation’s health care through voluntary accreditation. The Joint Commission’s on-site survey of SwedishAmerican occurred in early April.

For nearly 100 years, SwedishAmerican has been a leader in providing superior healthcare services for northern Illinois. The accreditation is effective for three years.

The updated standards seek to improve the quality of diagnostic services. The standards and related elements of performance provide clearer compliance expectations to make the on-site survey process more transparent, but continue to offer flexibility for laboratories to tailor the standards for their specific organization.

Approximately nine percent of the new standards and 32% of the new elements of performance are associated with removing the reference to AABB standards.

Accredited labs will receive the new standards in the 2011 Update 1 to the manual, to be published in March.

The new standards arrived as the Joint Commission worked closely with a group of laboratorians, including pathologists and laboratory managers from a wide range of facility sizes and types to provide broad insight into the quality system needs of laboratories.