In the news: Joint Commission issues Report on Quality and Safety 2010

Hospitals are improving the quality of care in heart attack, pneumonia, surgery, and children’s asthma patients, according to a new report, Improving America’s Hospitals: The Joint Commission’s Report on Quality and Safety 2010. Using data from more than 3,000 Joint Commission-accredited hospitals, this report focuses on accountability measures as it relates to patient outcomes.

For example, quality measures for inpatient childhood asthma show that hospital performance has drastically increased. The 2009 children’s asthma care result is 88.1%, up from 70.7% in 2007.

“Hospitals devote enormous resources and energy to using these performance measures to drive improvement in their clinical processes,” said The Joint Commission President Mark R. Chassin, MD, MPP, MPH, in a September 22 press release. “This report demonstrates that these efforts are resulting in consistently improving patient care in America’s hospitals.”