To improve the quality of services offered by health care institutions to the community, Joint Commission is responsible for providing health care accreditation as well as related services. It mainly supports performance improvement of the community health care organizations that are responsible for handling the issues of patients. Hence, performance measurement is considered to be a key link between the Joint Commission accreditation, the processes as well as the outcomes recorded from the patient care. According to Wakefield, Halbesleben, Ward, Qiu, Brokel, & Crandall (2013), it also helps the Joint Commission to trace the data trends and data patterns thus enabling it to work together with the community health hospital as they utilize the data to ensure improved quality of health care, reduced associated cost as well as improvement of client outcomes. Therefore, the joint commission has some principles which guide its activities when identifying, implementing and when using tools for estimating and improving individual care. I have been appointed as one of the Clinical Information Systems Committee members which is charged with the responsibilities of looking at the ways that automation can facilitate data collection for the upcoming accreditation visit by the joint commission. Hence, the paper intends to provide examples of how my community hospital demonstrates devotion to the joint commission information standards and state my reasons or rationale for my decisions to show that the example display compliance.
To demonstrate adherence to the Joint Commission Information Standards, my community hospital has conducted an employees and physicians survey. The survey was conducted in compliance to the hospital standards which are relatively related in some areas which include the emergency management, leadership, medication management and infection prevention management. The surveyors also decided to conduct interviews with the employees as well as the physicians so as to gather enough information to improve on the gaps that can cause failure of the hospital. The rationale for this decision is to ensure that areas which need improvement are identified and addressed.
Secondly, my community hospital decided to engage patients together with their families in the decision making process in the health care. The rationale behind this is to enable to achieve a meaningful way of using the EHRs as pronounced by the standards of the joint commission responsible for the accreditation. It also enables to create flexible and clear clinical pathways for proper provision of healthy services.
To show full adherence to the joint commission information standard, the community hospital decided to implement all the steps needed to show that they are fully committed to provide excellence services as required by the joint commission. Hence, strategies that ensure that the hospital is constantly working have been adopted so as to improve the experience of patient. The strategies include safety initiatives as well as accountability. The rationale behind this decision is to ensure that the Joint commission is left with no or few opportunities or gaps that need improvement and the leadership team of the hospital will be ready to address.
In conclusion, accreditation of the community hospital by the Joint Commission gives the processes and strategies for improvement in many of its areas. It can be implemented by enhancing the education of the staffs so as to help them handle their daily activities with ease. With the Joint Commission accreditations, the my community hospital is expecting to enhance its risk management system as well as risk reduction strategies that helps to improve the services offered to patients. Therefore, according the example given above, the community hospital is always displaying compliance because it keeps acting to improve the quality of services offered to patient. The paper has discussed on the examples of how my community hospital demonstrates adherence to the joint commission information standards where on each, a rationale for my decision to show that the example displays compliance is given.
- Wakefield, D., Halbesleben, J., Ward, M., Qiu, Q., Brokel, J., & Crandall, D.(2013).Development of a Measure of Clinical Information Systems Expectations and Experiences. Medical Care, 45(9), 884-890.