Joint Commission for Hospitals under review from Congress and a request to re-apply for certification has been made

Anyone in the hospital business knows exactly who the Joint Commission is. It is somewhat of a peers guided group that hospitals pay for to ensure they are up to standard, or in other words accredited. If you read below, one government worker was not impressed with her findings as a hospital in Los Angeles, the now closed Martin Luther King facility, but JACO has given the facility a passing grade and it took a year to close the facility after the report. The commission is re-applying for certification at the request of Congress, but right now the choices are few and far between for a hospital to select other auditing sources. They can choose a state agency, but as it states below 88% choose the Joint Commission.

The reports are not available for the public to read. The Joint Commission sells it's services to hospitals, thus in essence they are customers too, so read between the lines here. Government audits also found a meningitis patient who had mistakenly received a potent anticancer drug for four days at the Los Angeles hospital, and they persist until they are convinced corrections have been made.

There is a new player though who has opened in Houston, DNV Healthcare who could in time offer some competition, and some are stating that the Joint Commission varies too far from Medicare rules and procedures. Who has control of what is released on the reports, the hospitals, and by today's standards of transparency I think this is going to be an issue very soon, as more government agencies as well as private companies are working to bring this to light, in other words clean out the closets. Some consumers complain their voices have not been heard, and some have had some action from the commission, who's staff is basically doctors and other healthcare individuals. BD

Christine Cahill, a government inspector, walked in to the operating room of a Los Angeles county hospital and found a technician cleaning a surgical instrument. He told her that he had just washed it, but she noticed no water in the sink, so she questioned how he had cleaned it, and he said he had used a cleaner that was in a bottle on the shelf. "Give me a Q-Tip," she said. She shoved it into the hollow bore of the instrument. "Out came this crud," she recalled. It was dried-up fragments of bone and blood.

Now, the Joint Commission itself is under review. For the first time in three decades, Congress is requiring the commission to reapply for authority to certify that hospitals meet federal standards. The commission has a virtual monopoly on hospital accreditation; 88 percent of the nation’s hospitals now choose it over a state agency.

Value of hospital accreditations under review | Health | Star-Telegram.com