Home Health & Hospice Week

If you don’t like the idea of your accreditation survey results going public, you aren’t alone. The Joint Commission tells the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that’s a bad idea in recent comments.

Reminder: In its proposed rule for Hospital Inpatient Prospective Payment Systems for 2018, CMS proposes “to require that each national [Accrediting Organization] applying or reapplying for CMS approval of its Medicare provider or supplier accreditation program provide a statement acknowledging that it agrees to make all Medicare provider or supplier final accreditation survey reports (including statements of deficiency findings) as well as acceptable PoCs publicly available on its website within 90 days after such information is made available to those facilities for the most recent 3 years.” CMS adds in the rule, “This provision     would include all triennial, full, follow-up, focused, and complaint surveys, whether they are performed onsite or offsite” (see Eli’s HCW, Vol. XXVI, No. 16).

“The Joint Commission strongly supports making reliable and valid quality data about health care organizations public,” the Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois-based accrediting body says in its comments on the rule. “However, survey reports are not health care quality data. They are quality improvement tools for health care providers.”

Result: The proposed rule “would have the opposite of its intended effect and make it more difficult to assure safe and high-quality care for patients, not less,” the Joint Commission argues.

“Releasing the information we collect on hospitals and other health care organizations would make providers less candid about their weaknesses on our surveys; it would chill the open and confidential dialogue that is the foundation of our improvement efforts.”

Bottom line: “We all want better patient care, but this is not the way to achieve it,” the Joint Commission tells CMS.