Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organization (JCAHO) UPDATES

• The JCAHO has recently announced that the Comprehensive Review of Development and testing for National Implementation of Hospital Core Measures is now available on their Web site.  The interim report contains information that is related to hospital resources that were dedicated to core measure activities throughout the pilot project, including FTE/cost estimates for core measure data collection.  The history of core measure development and comparison group data, for up to nine months, can also be found at their site at www.jcaho.org/perfmeas/coremeas/pilot.html
• The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced that Medicare+Choice organizations licensed as health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and preferred provider organizations (PPOs) accredited by JCAHO will be "deemed" for meeting Medicare certification requirements.  For more information visit, www.jcaho.org/news/nb372.html.
• The JCAHO has reviewed 1,609 sentinel events since January 1995.  Of these, the most common are patient suicide at 6.7% op/post-op complications at 12.2%, medication errors at 11.4%, and wrong-site surgery at 11.3%.  For complete and updated information on sentinel event statistics visit, www.jcaho.org/sentinel/se_stats.html.