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Hospitals improve on Joint Commission measures
NEWS IN BRIEF — Posted Oct. 1, 2012
U.S. hospitals are meeting key quality metrics nearly all the time for patients with heart attack, pneumonia and stroke, the Joint Commission said in September. More than 3,300 hospitals accredited by the Joint Commission delivered evidence-based heart attack care 98.5% of the time in 2011. That figure is up from 88.6% in 2002, the year the commission first gauged performance in areas such as giving heart-attack patients aspirin at arrival, said the annual quality report (link).
Performance on pneumonia care measures rose to 96.2%, up from 72.4% in 2002. On surgical care quality measures such administering antibiotics within an hour of a procedure, hospitals hit the mark 97.6% of the time, compared with 82.1% of the time in 2005, the first year of surgical quality measurement. Hospitals also scored 94.9% on stroke care metrics. The commission dubbed 620 hospitals as “top performers” for scoring 95% or better on each of the 45 quality metrics included.
Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2012/10/01/prbf1001.htm.
