JCAHO will look at outcomes data

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations announced in February that it will soon look at a hospital or nursing home’s success rate for certain treatments and procedures in granting accreditation. These standards would be even tougher than the Health Care Financing Administration’s.

Under the current accreditation system, JCAHO looks at whether "appropriate medical procedures" are used. It does not review the results of that care. But now the accreditation body says it must face the cries of insurers and the public about how care measures up.

But one ethics expert says the trend to predict outcomes may be a worry for ethics committees in the future. "What will happen if we determine that a particular treatment is only successful in a third of all patients? Will we decide it’s not worth the expense?" asks John D. Banja, PhD, associate professor in the department of rehabilitation medicine at Emory University in Atlanta.