Joint Commission

Franklin Square Hospital Center earned a certificate of distinction from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations for its pediatric asthma management program. The program was introduced to the Franklin Square Pediatric Emergency Department and Inpatient Unit in December 2008. The goal was to raise the standard of care by consistently and efficiently managing pediatric asthma patients using a team-oriented approach. Franklin Square is one of only seven hospitals and organizations in the country and one of two in the state to have achieved Joint Commission certification for a pediatric asthma program.

Franklin Square Hospital Center earned a certificate of distinction from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations for its pediatric asthma management program. The program was introduced to the Franklin Square Pediatric Emergency Department and Inpatient Unit in December 2008. The goal was to raise the standard of care by consistently and efficiently managing pediatric asthma patients using a team-oriented approach. Franklin Square is one of only seven hospitals and organizations in the country and one of two in the state to have achieved Joint Commission certification for a pediatric asthma program.

CHICAGO -- The nation's most influential health care regulator frequently serves the interests of the hospital industry over those of the public, giving its seal of approval to medical centers riddled by life-threatening problems and underreporting of patient deaths caused by infections and hospital errors. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, based in Oakbrook Terrace, Ill., has been empowered by Congress to ensure the quality and safety of hospitals. Operating as a virtual monopoly for monitoring public health care, the commission promotes its surveys as an assurance that hospitals are clean, adequately staffed and provide superior care.

I am thinking about the events that occurred at the Johns Hopkins Hospital on Sept. 16. Apparently, a surgeon was providing an update to one of his patients about her condition; her son heard the conversation, pulled a semi-automatic handgun out of his pants and shot the surgeon on the spot, right there in one of the most famous hospitals in the world. All this because the shooter was apparently unhappy with the medical care provided for his mother. He then proceeded to use that gun to kill the patient and then himself, in the process terrorizing the hospital, its patients and visitors for the better part of a day. I interact with our health care system as a doctor at this hospital, as well as being a potential patient and visitor, and I am left with an uneasy feeling about what this means for our society.

The panel that accredits U.S. hospitals has asked Johns Hopkins Hospital to review its security measures — and potential improvements — in the wake of the shooting of a doctor by the distraught son of a patient last week. Hopkins has 45 days from when Dr. David B. Cohen was shot to submit a report to the Joint Commission, the independent, nonprofit panel that offers accreditation for more than 18,000 health care organizations and programs in the United States. The commission says it identifies "sentinel events" such as postoperative complications or medical errors and uses them to improve the safety and quality of health care provided to the public.

Ness named director of hospital's recordsPamela Ness of York, Pa., has been named director of medical records at Carroll County General Hospital.A registered record administrator, Ms. Ness has worked for hospitals in Pennsylvania since 1986, when she was hired by Holy Spirit Hospital in Camp Hill to supervise its medical records department.In 1988, she joined the staff of York's Memorial Hospital as department manager. At Memorial, she developed criteria to monitor the hospital's medical records for the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Health Care Organizations.

The decision by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations to downgrade Anne Arundel Medical Center's rating is no cause for patients to panic.Although the Annapolis hospital has been put on probation and ordered to make changes, the oral and written reports from a surprise inspection by the commission on March 3 make it clear that AAMC's shortcoming is in its documentation of policies and training procedures within the pharmacy department, not in its care of patients.

Harbor Hospital Center recently was awarded a three-year Certificateof Accreditation by th Joint Commission of Healthcare Organizations.The JCAHO accreditation recognizes the hospital's outstanding efforts to provide quality health care.JCAHO evaluated Harbor Hospital recently and pointed out some of the strengths and ways to improve procedures and management systems.Accreditation is important for the hospital to qualify for participation in various professional internship, residency, and continuing education programs and to facilitate reimbursement from insurance companies and other organizations and agencies.

Responding to reports of suspect HIV laboratory tests affecting more than 400 patients, state and federal inspectors teamed up with hospital accreditation officials yesterday in an on-site survey of Maryland General Hospital. Lee Kennedy, a hospital spokesman, said nine inspectors from the government agencies and the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Healthcare showed up at the 245-bed facility. Although the visit was unscheduled, it was not a surprise. "We expected them to do a survey once we reported the incident," Kennedy said.

WASHINGTON - Although the nation's largest accreditor of hospitals regularly missed serious problems that put patients at risk, the federal government is virtually powerless to discipline the agency, according to a report issued yesterday by Congress' investigative arm. To deal with the issue, a bipartisan group has introduced legislation to strip the private agency of the special status it has had since Medicare was instituted in 1965. The measure would bring the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations under tighter control, supporters said.

The panel that accredits U.S. hospitals has asked Johns Hopkins Hospital to review its security measures — and potential improvements — in the wake of the shooting of a doctor by the distraught son of a patient last week. Hopkins has 45 days from when Dr. David B. Cohen was shot to submit a report to the Joint Commission, the independent, nonprofit panel that offers accreditation for more than 18,000 health care organizations and programs in the United States. The commission says it identifies "sentinel events" such as postoperative complications or medical errors and uses them to improve the safety and quality of health care provided to the public.

There is an effort to rehabilitate the memory of Joe McCarthy, the pugnacious anti-communist who, as Wisconsin's junior U.S. senator in the 1950s, led a Red Scare crusade widely viewed in history as heavy on witch hunt and short on facts. The latest effort is a book by conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History. We're all for getting history right. The argument seems to be that newly available Soviet files indicate a spying effort that would have warranted Mr. McCarthy's fear-mongering and that he even got some names right.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki of Iran, on the second day of his visit to Iraq, said yesterday that the two countries had agreed to form a joint commission to oversee border issues, and its primary task would be to "block saboteurs" crossing the 700-mile border. "We plan to form a joint commission between Iran and Iraq to control our borders and block the way to saboteurs whose aim is to destabilize the security of the two countries," Mottaki said in Najaf after talks with Iraq's most powerful Shiite religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Husseini al-Sistani.

WASHINGTON - Although the nation's largest accreditor of hospitals regularly missed serious problems that put patients at risk, the federal government is virtually powerless to discipline the agency, according to a report issued yesterday by Congress' investigative arm. To deal with the issue, a bipartisan group has introduced legislation to strip the private agency of the special status it has had since Medicare was instituted in 1965. The measure would bring the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations under tighter control, supporters said.

Responding to reports of suspect HIV laboratory tests affecting more than 400 patients, state and federal inspectors teamed up with hospital accreditation officials yesterday in an on-site survey of Maryland General Hospital. Lee Kennedy, a hospital spokesman, said nine inspectors from the government agencies and the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Healthcare showed up at the 245-bed facility. Although the visit was unscheduled, it was not a surprise. "We expected them to do a survey once we reported the incident," Kennedy said.

For all the focus on reducing medical errors in recent years, the cultural changes that institutions must make to keep patients safe have been slow to develop. The gravity of the problem was highlighted this week in the case of a 17-year-old girl who was given a heart and lungs from an organ donor of the wrong blood type at Duke University Hospital. More than three years after the Institute of Medicine released a headline-grabbing report on the frequency of errors and a plan for reducing them, some medical experts say progress has been limited.

MOSCOW -- Seven U.S. Marines in dress uniform marched slowly across the tarmac at a Moscow airport yesterday, past solemn Russian generals and alert Border Patrol troops, carrying a plain metal flag-draped coffin to a waiting Air Force jet.They bore what are almost certainly the remains of Capt. John Robertson Dunham, an Easton, Md., man and 1950 Naval Academy graduate who was navigator on a U.S. reconnaissance plane shot down by a Soviet fighter in 1952.The remains had come from an unmarked grave, discovered by a joint U.S.-Russian team Sept.

CCGH accredited by health-care groupWESTMINSTER -- Carroll County General Hospital has been awarded a three-year accreditation from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health-care Organizations (JCAHO).This is the maximum period of accreditation allowed.In compliance with JCAHO inspection criteria, surveyors analyzed the policies of every clinical department and nursing unit; reviewed hospital and committee reports; and examined medical staff procedures.They also interviewed employees and physicians and spoke with individual patients about the care they received during their hospital stay.

CHICAGO -- The nation's most influential health care regulator frequently serves the interests of the hospital industry over those of the public, giving its seal of approval to medical centers riddled by life-threatening problems and underreporting of patient deaths caused by infections and hospital errors. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, based in Oakbrook Terrace, Ill., has been empowered by Congress to ensure the quality and safety of hospitals. Operating as a virtual monopoly for monitoring public health care, the commission promotes its surveys as an assurance that hospitals are clean, adequately staffed and provide superior care.

The national organization that accredits hospitals decided yesterday that it will keep Shady Grove Adventist Hospital on conditional accreditation status -- the only Maryland hospital so designated -- extending a period of unusually strict scrutiny for the Rockville facility. The attention began in October, when Shady Grove's medical staff said it was worried about quality, setting off a series of inspections and downgradings by state and federal regulators and by the private Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Health- care Organizations (JCAHO)