Joint Commission Annual Report

Check out the annual report recently released by the Joint Commission. While things seem to be on the upswing, looks like there's still room for improvement in hospital quality of care:

Hospitals are currently achieving a national average of 90 percent performance or higher on only about half of the measures tracked since 2002. Hospitals are performing at less than 65 percent nationwide on two measures tracked since 2002: providing pneumococcal screening and vaccination to pneumonia patients, and providing discharge instructions to heart failure patients. The Joint Commission encourages all hospitals to strive for 100 percent performance on all measures.

On measures tracked for the first time in 2005, performance is generally lower and more variable than on the performance for measures tracked since 2002, showing a correlation between performance measurement and quality.

Significant differences exist in the performance of hospitals by state. For example, the performance of hospitals in different states on the measure of providing smoking cessation advice to heart attack patients ranged from a high of 96.8 percent performance in the highest-performing state to a low of 67.6 percent in the lowest-performing state.

CME Providers in health care delivery institutions, check out your hospital's quality performance at qualitycheck.org.