News Briefs
JCAHO safety center offers new web site
The recently opened Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) International Center for Patient Safety has launched a new web site, www.jcipatientsafety.org, designed to serve as a major, central repository of resources and information related to all aspects of patient safety.
Its content will be relevant for patients, employers, physicians, nurses, and pharmacists, as well as for all types of health care organizations worldwide.
Ultimately, the site will provide an array of practical safety solutions that can be used to improve the safety and quality of patient care in a variety of health care environments, including, but not limited to, hospitals, outpatient clinics, physician offices, nursing homes, home care settings, behavioral health centers, and assisted-living facilities.
Health care organizations and health professionals will be able to use the center’s web site, for example, to find information on the most frequent types of reported sentinel events and their root causes; resources for understanding and meeting the National Patient Safety Goals; and Sentinel Event Alert newsletter recommendations.
The site also will become a focus of the center’s efforts to create a worldwide collaborative network of patient safety leadership organizations.
On-line discussion groups will provide an interactive forum for international dialogue on critical patient safety issues and topics.
The new web site is one of the first priority projects for the recently announced International Center for Patient Safety.
Jointly sponsored by JCAHO and Joint Com-mission Resources, the center advocates for safety in health care through prompting the adoption of solutions that are based on sound scientific research, expert professional consensus opinion, and principles of multidisciplinary education.
CMS releases its proposed inpatient rule
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published its proposed Medicare inpatient prospective system rule for fiscal year 2006 in the May 5 Federal Register.
According to CMS, acute-care hospitals that submit data on 10 quality measures would receive under the rule a 3.2% increase in their payment rates for inpatient services in FY 2006, while hospitals that do not submit quality information will receive an update that is 0.4 percentage points lower, or 2.8%.
CMS also is proposing an extension of the post-acute care transfer provision, from 29 DRGs to 223, which would cost hospitals an estimated $880 million in FY 2006 alone, according to a special bulletin from the American Hospital Association.
NQF releases outpatient care draft standards
The National Quality Forum (NQF) has released for comment a set of 50 proposed voluntary consensus standards for measuring and reporting the quality of outpatient care.
The proposed standards include measures in seven areas: asthma/respiratory conditions; depression/behavioral health; bone diseases; heart disease; hypertension; prenatal care; and prevention, immunization, and screening.
Public comments were due by May 16, and NQF member comments by May 23.
Under the organization’s consensus process, NQF members then would vote on a revised draft of the standards.
AHA: GAO’s report on 75% rule misses the mark’
In a recently published report on the "75% rule," the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that a patient’s medical condition is not sufficient criteria for determining which patients can benefit from care at an inpatient rehabilitation facility.
The report recommends the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services expand its fiscal intermediaries’ (FIs) review of inpatient rehabilitation facility admissions, encourage further research on inpatient rehabilitation facility care, and use that information to refine its rule to include factors such as patient function. GAO does not, however, identify new qualifying conditions to be added.
Rick Pollack, executive vice president of the American Hospital Association (AHA), said the report "misses the mark" by failing to address the questions Congress posed and proposing recommendations that could harm Medicare beneficiaries.
He said that while the AHA supports the call for additional research to refine the 75% rule, the association strongly disagrees with the use of medical review to collect information for rule refinement, saying FIs do not have the necessary resources or clinical expertise.
The recently opened Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) International Center for Patient Safety has launched a new web site, www.jcipatientsafety.org, designed to serve as a major, central repository of resources and information related to all aspects of patient safety.Subscribe Now for Access
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