Introduction from The Joint Commission President

Over the past six years, Joint Commission-accredited hospitals have made quality and safety a priority—and the numbers prove it! This report presents scientific evidence of improvement and how it relates to common medical conditions and procedures.

Improving America’s Hospitals: The Joint Commission’s Report on Quality and Safety 2008 provides the broadest picture of quality and safety performance ever presented by The Joint Commission. This report documents how well hospitals have performed in treating heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia and in providing surgical care; 25 individual measures are tracked from one to six years. In addition, hospital performance against 2007 National Patient Safety Goals (NPSGs) is reviewed, as well as NPSG performance trends back to 2003. Joint Commission hospitals showed improvement on all measures tracked from 2006 to 2007, as well as steady, cumulative quality improvement from 2002 to 2007.

While Joint Commission-accredited hospitals deserve congratulations for improving the quality of care, there is more work to be done. Improvement is a continuous process and for health care especially, it’s one where the target is constantly moving. While national performance on some measures nears 100 percent, performance of other measures is in the 50 to 70 percent range. And so the work to improve care continues.

By taking the lead on quality and safety improvement, Joint Commission-accredited hospitals are saving lives and improving the health and quality of life for thousands of patients. By documenting the results of hospital improvement efforts, The Joint Commission measures progress and continually raises the bar toward even better results.

The Joint Commission’s commitment to quality and safety extends beyond the work described in this report. Best known as a hospital accreditation organization, The Joint Commission also provides related services that support performance improvement and actively collaborates with organizations sharing its commitment to quality and safety. Collaborative efforts with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the National Quality Forum (NQF), and the Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA) and others help assure efficiency, consistency and scientific credibility in data collection. This type of collaboration should lead to industry-wide agreement on current and new priorities and on new and improved methods for optimizing health care quality and patient safety.

In everything they do, Joint Commission-accredited hospitals work on behalf of patients, doing all they can to assure the delivery of safe, quality care. This report provides a sense of the commitment these hospitals share and how the Joint Commission helps them to save and improve lives.

Sincerely,

Mark R. Chassin, M.D., M.P.P., M.P.H.
President
The Joint Commission