Joint Commission taps 405 hospitals as top performers

The Joint Commission has named 405 hospitals as front runners in care, particularly in achieving high quality of care through use of evidence-based guidelines. The providers all have been recognized as top achievers through the Commission’s Top Performers on Key Quality Measures Program. Additionally, the Commission found that care improvement increased 14.8 percent over a nine-year span.

The Commission’s 2011 annual report on quality and safety is the first to recognize hospitals for achieving excellent outcomes. The study also reports on both accountability and non-accountability measures. The measure sets include heart attack care, heart failure care and pneumonia, as well as surgical care, stroke care and venous thromboembolism care, among others.

The 405 hospitals represent nearly 14 percent of all Joint Commission accredited hospitals that report data. The decision was based on 22 accountability measures and each top performer met two 95 percent performance thresholds. A score of 95 percent means a hospital demonstrated evidence-based practices 95 times out of 100.

The report showed that hospital performance significantly improved over time, which has resulted in more desirable patient outcomes. For example, in 2002, hospitals achieved an 81.8 percent composite performance on 957,000 opportunities to perform care related to accountability measures. In 2010, hospitals achieved 96.6 percent composite performance on 12.3 million opportunities—a nine-year improvement of 14.8 percentage points.

Likewise, care for MI patients improved 11.5 percentage points between 2002 and 2010, from 86.9 percent to 98.4 percent. To gather this number, the Commission looked at the administration of aspirin upon arrival, aspirin at discharge, ACE inhibitor/ARB at discharge, beta-blocker at discharge, fibrinolytic therapy within 30 minutes and PCI therapy within 90 minutes.

The Commission reported that 60.5 percent of hospitals provided fibrinolytic therapy within 30 minutes of a presentation of an acute heart attack.

Surgical care also improved by 14.3 percent, from 82.1 percent in 2005 to 96.4 percent in 2010. A major finding of the study was the improvement of hospitals to achieve the composite accountability measures greater than 90 percent. In fact, in 2002 this number was only 20.4 percent; however, in 2010, this number rose to nearly 92 percent.

The Joint Commission evaluates and accredits more than 19,000 healthcare organizations in the U.S., which includes more than 103,000 hospitals. The current report collaborated data from nearly 3,000 hospitals.

“By following evidence-based care processes, hospitals will continue to improve the quality of the care they provide,” Mark R. Chassin, MD, president of the Commission, said in a statement. “The Joint Commission stands ready as ever to help hospitals in quality improvement efforts that will create better outcomes for patients and a healthier nation.”

You may view a list of the 405 hospitals here.