Joint Commission Resources Awarded Funds to Improve Hospital Care and Patient Safety

OAK BROOK, IL--(Marketwire - Dec 15, 2011) - Joint Commission Resources (JCR) is one of 26 leading health care organizations that will work with hospitals to make health care safer and less costly by targeting and reducing the millions of preventable injuries and complications from health care-associated conditions.

As a part of the Partnership for Patients initiative, a nationwide public-private collaboration to improve the quality, safety, and affordability of health care for all Americans, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that $218 million will go to 26 state, regional, national, or hospital system organizations including JCR. As a Hospital Engagement Network, JCR will select and work with 50 hospitals across many states to implement performance improvement strategies. JCR will collaborate and innovate with the other network awardees to achieve the Partnership for Patients objectives and to ultimately make care safer, more reliable, and less costly. Under JCR's leadership, several other organizations will support the education, improvement, and measurement activities of JCR's Hospital Engagement Network project, including The Joint Commission's Division of Healthcare Quality Evaluation, The Patient Safety Education Program housed at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine, HealthCare Team Training, LLC, EnCompass LLC, and Social Interventions and Research, Inc.

"Joint Commission Resources is pleased to be chosen as a Hospital Engagement Network and would like to thank CMS for this opportunity to actively engage in the innovative Partnership for Patients initiative. Joint Commission Resources has a strong history of working with hospitals in clinical quality and patient safety improvement initiatives, and this national project will be an important continuation of that work," says Anne L. Rooney, vice president, Global Consulting, Joint Commission Resources.

The Partnership for Patients brings together leaders of major hospitals, employers, physicians, nurses, and patient advocates along with state and federal governments in a shared effort to make hospital care safer, more reliable, and less costly. The Hospital Engagement Networks that JCR will be working with are a key part of that initiative, and will be funded by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Innovation Center, which was established by the Affordable Care Act. Hospital Engagement Networks will work to develop learning collaboratives for hospitals and provide a wide array of initiatives and activities to improve patient safety. JCR will conduct intensive training programs to teach and support hospitals in making patient care safer, provide technical assistance to hospitals so that hospitals can achieve quality measurement goals, and establish and implement a system to track and monitor hospital progress in meeting quality improvement goals. The activities of the Hospital Engagement Networks will be closely monitored by CMS to ensure that they are improving patient safety.

"At some point in our lives, many of us are going to need hospital care and we need to be confident that no matter where we live, we're going to get the best care in the world," said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. "The Partnership for Patients is helping the nation's finest health systems share their knowledge and resources to make sure every hospital knows how to provide all of its patients with the highest quality care."

Launched in April 2011, the Partnership for Patients now consists of more than 6,500 partners, including over 3,167 hospitals, along with employers, health plans, physicians, nurses, patient advocates, and state and federal government officials who have pledged to work together to reduce the number of hospital-acquired conditions by 40 percent and reduce hospital readmissions by 20 percent by the end of 2013.

Achieving the Partnership for Patients' objectives would mean approximately 1.8 million fewer injuries to patients in the hospital, saving over 60,000 lives over three years, and would mean more than 1.6 million patients recovered from illness without suffering a preventable complication requiring re-hospitalization.

For more information on the Partnership for Patients, please visit http://www.healthcare.gov/partnershipforpatients. For more information on the JCR Hospital Engagement Network please contact Nanne Finis at nfinis@jcrinc.com or 630.268.7429.

Joint Commission Resources (JCR), a not-for-profit affiliate of The Joint Commission, is the official publisher and educator of The Joint Commission. JCR is an expert resource for health care organizations, providing consulting services, educational services and publications to assist in improving quality and safety and to help in meeting the accreditation standards of The Joint Commission. JCR provides consulting services independently from The Joint Commission and in a fully confidential manner. Please visit our Web site at www.jcrinc.com.