JCAHO Becomes Formal Partner With The Leapfrog Group

Oakbrook Terrace, IL - January 16, 2002 - The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) has accepted an invitation from The Leapfrog Group to become a formal partner. This new partnering arrangement relationship cements a previously informal relationship with the health care purchaser group and means that The Leapfrog Group will seek JCAHO's input on its patient safety initiatives.

The Leapfrog Group is a growing consortium of more than 90 Fortune 500 companies and other large private and public health care purchasers founded by The Business Roundtable. The group launched a national effort in November 2000 to educate employees, retirees, and their families about medical errors and the importance of hospital efforts to make advances in patient safety, and to reward hospitals for their efforts in improving patient safety. Leapfrog purchasers provide health benefits to more than 26 million Americans and spend more than $46 billion on health care annually. The group was established in the wake of the 1999 Institute of Medicine report, To Err is Human, that makes the reduction errors a top United States priority. More information on The Leapfrog Group is available at their website.

"The Joint Commission welcomes this opportunity to collaborate with the purchaser community in support of patient safety", says Dennis S. O'Leary, M.D., president, Joint Commission. "The Leapfrog Group's work symbolizes the priority accorded to patient safety by those key stakeholders--purchasers, accreditors, and health care providers--who will eventually have the greatest impact in making improvements happen."

In the first major collaboration effort between the two parties, the Joint Commission has begun work with Leapfrog leaders to pursue the identification of a specific set of ICU-related outcome and process measures. These measures may eventually be used to supplement or even replace the current Leapfrog measures which recommend that hospitals have board-certified or board-eligible intensivists.

The Joint Commission has made patient safety its top priority since implementing its performance based standards framework in 1995. It maintains the nations most comprehensive database of adverse health events and their underlying causes, and regularly issues lessons-learned patient safety alerts to all of its 18,000 accredited organizations. More than half of Joint Commission accreditation standards address patient safety requirements. Standards issued in 1999 require the internal definition, reporting, and analysis of adverse events in accredited health care organizations and the implementation of indicated improvements. New standards that were implemented last year encourage the creation of a culture of safety in hospitals, set forth expectations for the identification and redesign of error prone systems, and require the disclosure of unanticipated outcomes to patients and/or their families.

In addition to becoming a formal partner to The Leapfrog Group, the Joint Commission is involved in collaborative activities with various other groups who share its priority for patient safety. With the U.S. Pharmacopeia, the Joint Commission leads a coalition of more than a dozen health care professionals and provider organizations that have developed principles for "constructing patient-safety reporting programs." The Joint Commission also participates in a Medication Error Coalition whose efforts have resulted in the introduction of legislation that would provide funding to secure technologies that will support patient safety in hospitals and assure appropriate training of staff to use the technology.

The Joint Commission, finally, is a founding member of both the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) and the National Patient Safety Partnership (NPSP). The Joint Commission continues to serve on the board of the NPSF, which serves as a clearinghouse of patient safety information and funds innovative research dedicated to reducing risk. The NPSP is composed of federal and private sector bodies having strong patient safety priorities and is hosted by the Veterans Health Administration.

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