Joint Commission 'Top Performers' List Adds 200 Hospitals

Many of the measures are similar to those used for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services value-based purchasing incentive program, which was set forth by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

That program encourages hospitals to meet quality of care standards by deducting up to 1% of their Medicare base DRG payments for discharges in the 2013 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. 

Hospitals are scored on the basis of a rolling, three-year average of how they perform on certain quality measures such as whether the patients admitted for surgery received antibiotics within one hour before the first incision, or whether patients with a heart attack received fibrinolytic therapy within the first 30 minutes of their arrival to the hospital.

But Sprenger and Bowie say that the Joint Commission's reporting system allows hospitals to compare their performance for each quarter, and offers resources such as a peer-to-peer "solution exchanges."

In a statement from the report, Joint Commission President, Mark Chassin, MD, said that making the commission's list "is no easy feat. Each recognized hospital met two 95% performance thresholds." They had to achieve 95% or above on one composite score that includes all measures on which they report data to the commission. And each hospital had to meet or exceed 95% performance target for every accountability measures for which it reports data.

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