Joint commission is here....

Association between patient outcomes and accreditation in US hospitals: observational study

I’m going to say that while I understand what joint commission is trying to do, they need to provide a better value for their service based on this article. When joint commission walks through the door of the hospital, it’s similar to a large event where everyone in the hospital becomes immediately aware. Everyone on their best behavior. Water bottles only at the water bottle station. Don’t practice real world medicine like titrate your pressors up faster than the order when your patient is crashing and burning. All this trouble has to be good for something, right? Or is this a place where our tax dollars go to die?
This study looked at three fundamental questions that we all think every time that we hear that they are coming. Does being accredited by JCO lead to better outcomes? Is JCO better than the other accrediting institutions? Does patient experience, you know, the important thing here, improve whether the shop is accredited by JCO versus a state institution versus an a different accrediting institution?
The link to the article is down below so you can read their findings for yourself.
Here are their principal findings:
“Among US hospitals, we found no meaningful association between private accreditation and mortality rates. Although the readmission rates for the 15 selected medical conditions (but not the six selected surgical conditions) were lower for accredited hospitals than for state survey hospitals, the differences were modest. Furthermore, accredited hospitals had, on average, modestly worse patient experience scores than state survey hospitals. The lack of meaningful differences in outcomes between accredited and state survey hospitals suggest that a closer examination of the benefits of private accreditation would be useful.”
Joint commission responded, as one would expect, and shredded the study here. Their reputation was at stake. I can’t blame them. There are some flaws to the methodology of the study, just like there are flaws in the methodology of how they want us to practice the art of medicine.
A 🎩 tip to the authors.

-EJ





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Link to article

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