How good is your hospital? (JCAHO CMS to the rescue!)

Posted 10 July, 2007 in EHRs, news, solutions

We’ve talked before about the importance of universal metrics and standards (e.g. IT security metrics (see: HIPAA intro and HIPAA enforcement) and EHR functionality.) Well, now that you have patient encounter data safely in your hosted EHR database, you’ll need some way to measure how well the medical practitioners are doing their jobs.

Enter JCAHO^*– Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services– CMS (I know, they forgot an M in there…)

Those two organizations have identified “core measures” which they use 1. to determine JCAHO accreditation and 2. to determine if the hospital gets government money (Medicare & Medicaid).

An example, please!

A patient is admitted to the ER who has suffered a heart attack. JCAHO/CMS core measure AMI-1 states that the patient needs to be administered aspirin within 24 hours. There are five main categories of core measures with over thirty sub-measures. Running through your encounters manually to check against core measures would quickly become exhausting.

Wouldn’t it be nice if your EHR program could analyze your EHR encounter data and produce handy reports which show your JCAHO/CMS compliance levels? Well, there is at least one EHR vendor whose product now does that: RemedyMD’s OutcomeTrack. You can now even test drive their core measures analysis tool for free online (registration required).

If JCAHO accreditation is in the present or future of your hospital or practice, be sure that your EHR supports JCAHO/CMS reporting. If not, switch to an EHR vendor who does!

* The Joint Commission, an independent, not-for-profit organization, is the nation’s predominant standards-setting and accrediting body in health care. JCAHO is committed to improving healthcare nationwide and it evaluates medical facility compliance based on a focused set of “requirements” that are long known as essential to the delivery of good patient care.A JCAHO certification is considered the gold seal of approval and current law says hospitals accredited by JCAHO are automatically eligible for Medicare reimbursement.

The JCAHO web site can be found at www.jcaho.org (which is an alias for http://www.jointcommission.org/ )