Nursing Assistant Resources On The Web

I worked at a hospital with Patti for about a year, a long time ago. It was a great experience-we learned a lot and got certified to do many more things than we were allowed to do at the nursing homes. The one thing we both really hated was the accredidation process for JCAHO. What a waste of time I thought that was. Management would go insane for a couple months before an inspection (the dates of which were well known ahead of time).

They focused on the paperwork and nothing else. It’s no different today, except that now they use computers to send along information ahead of an inspection. It’s still all about the paper though, and as far as I am concerned, the actual patient care issues mean nothing to the people at JCAHO. So long as the records look good, a hospital will get it’s accreditation.

By the way, this group does not FORCE itself onto any hospital. Rather, the hospitals beg and plead to get inspected…so they can have the coveted and esteemed seal of approval.

A powerful national organization that enforces quality standards for hospitals said yesterday that it had found a flaw in software that it had sold to more than 1,000 hospitals, which use the program to help them qualify for accreditation and payments from Medicare.

Joint Commission Resources, a unit of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, disclosed the defect in a note on its Web site.

Many hospital officials across the country said they were reluctant to publicly criticize the commission, which sends auditors to check whether hospitals are meeting more than 1,300 criteria.

Robert Curran, director of clinical excellence at the O’Connor Hospital in San Jose, Calif., said many hospitals were concerned that they might have lost quality- control data already entered into their systems.

The software, which costs members several thousand dollars a year for hospital groups, and $495 to $1,095 for small hospitals, is used to help create files showing, for example, that a hospital has fully informed patients of their rights.

The problem was a missing identification marker that alerts a hospital to the 250 standards among the 1,300 that the commission and its auditors regard as essential. Without the marker, a hospital might overlook essential categories in which it must verify its compliance.

Hospitals failing to meet the essential standards must come into compliance within 90 days and demonstrate to auditors that they remain in compliance during the following four months, a commission spokesman said.

Diane Martin, the executive director of Joint Commission Resources, said in a telephone interview yesterday that the error was minor and would be fixed today. On its Web site, the joint commission said the error was “a production glitch.”

Mr. Curran, however, described the problem as much more serious. “How about calling it an earthquake,” he said.

Karen H. Timmons, chief executive of Joint Commission Resources, said it placed the notice of the error on its Web site “as soon as we learned of it.” She said hospitals seeking accreditation were not required to use the Joint Commission Resources software.

Jeff Cleary, a spokesman for Xpediate Consulting, said his computer specialists found the omission a few days ago and warned hospital clients of possible problems. Xpediate sells software to assist hospitals with the Joint Commission requirements.

When administrators at several hospitals began asking Joint Commission Resources about the omitted markers, according to Xpediate officials, they were initially told that the markers would not be restored until the next update in August.