Joint Commission joins Leapfrog Group as partner
Identifying outcome and process measures
The clout of the Leapfrog Group appears to have grown substantially with the addition of the Oakbrook Terrace, IL-based Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) as a formal partner.
The groups had previously had an informal relationship. Under the new arrangement, the Leapfrog Group will seek JCAHO’s input on its patient safety initiatives. The Leapfrog Group is a consortium of more than 90 Fortune 500 companies and other large private and public health care purchasers founded by The Business Roundtable. Established in the wake of the 1999 Institute of Medicine report To Err is Human, the Leapfrog Group addresses the reduction of errors in the health care industry. (More information on The Leapfrog Group is available at www.leapfroggroup.org.) In November 2000, the group launched a formal effort to educate employees, retirees, and their families about medical errors and the importance of hospital efforts to make advances in patient safety, and to reward hospitals for their efforts in improving patient safety.
Money is the root of the Leapfrog Group’s power. Leapfrog purchasers provide health benefits to more than 26 million Americans and spend more than $46 billion on health care annually. By threatening to withhold their purchasing dollars from health care providers that do not comply with its mandates, the Leapfrog Group’s members can exert tremendous influence.
Dennis S. O’Leary, MD, president of the Joint Commission, released a statement saying the goals of the two groups are compatible, if not actually synonymous.
"The Leapfrog Group’s work symbolizes the priority accorded to patient safety by those key stakeholders — purchasers, accreditors, and health care providers — who eventually will have the greatest impact in making improvements happen," he says.
The collaboration already has begun, O’Leary says. The Joint Commission has begun work with Leapfrog leaders to identify a specific set of intensive care unit-related outcome and process measures. He says these measures eventually may be used to supplement or even replace the current Leapfrog measures, which recommend that hospitals have board-certified or board-eligible intensivists.
In addition to becoming a formal partner with The Leapfrog Group, the Joint Commission is involved in collaborative activities with various other groups that share its emphasis on patient safety. With the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, the Joint Commission leads a coalition of more than a dozen health care professionals and provider organizations that have developed principles for constructing patient-safety reporting programs. The Joint Commission also participates in a Medication Error Coalition whose efforts have resulted in the introduction of legislation that would provide funding to secure technologies that will support patient safety in hospitals and assure appropriate training of staff to use the technology.
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