Award categories
- Ambulatory Care
- Behavioral Health Care
- Home Care (Includes Home Health, Personal Care and Support Services, Infusion Therapy, Home Medical Equipment, and Hospice Care)
- Hospitals
- Laboratories
- Long Term Care
- Multiple Organization Team (Composed of multiple Joint Commission accredited organizations that work collaboratively on a single performance improvement initiative).
- Disease-Specific Care Certification
Requirements
- Applications are accepted only from Joint Commission accredited organizations or Disease-Specific Care certified programs.
- Accredited organizations may apply only in an accreditation category under which they are accredited (unless it is a multi-organization entry). For example:
- Psychiatric hospitals are evaluated under the Comprehensive Accreditation Manual for Hospitals and are therefore eligible in the hospital category.
- A home care corporation submitting a performance improvement initiative for a group of its agencies is eligible under the multiple organization team category. It is not eligible under the home care category.
- Hospitals with distinct governance and ownership that work together on a community-wide performance improvement initiative are eligible to apply under the multiple organization team category, not the hospital category.
- Organizations that are not Joint Commission accredited but which have a Disease Specific Care certified program are eligible to submit an application for that certified program.
- A Joint Commission accredited health care organization or certified program may submit more than one initiative.
- Applications for the laboratory accreditation category will only be accepted if the CLIA number of the applicant laboratory has been surveyed and is accredited by The Joint Commission
- Organizations that have a Joint Commission commissioner as an active member of the performance improvement initiative are disqualified from award eligibility.
Application and review process
An eligible accredited organization, certified program or a multiple organization team may submit any performance measurement and improvement initiative that reflects a significant performance improvement achievement. Submitted initiatives should be blinded before the evaluation process begins. The Ernest Amory Codman Award Evaluation Committee, composed of experts in performance improvement, reviews the applications and identifies organizations to receive an on-site visit. Organizations whose applications are not selected will be notified by letter toward the end of the process in September.
The on-site visit is conducted by a special evaluation team that reviews the submitted performance measurement and improvement activity, validates the information submitted in the application, and reviews the relationship between the initiative and the organization’s overall quality improvement framework. The Ernest Amory Codman Award Evaluation Committee then evaluates the on-site visit findings and recommends award recipients to the Executive Committee of the Board of Commissioners of The Joint Commission. If, in the committee’s estimation, no initiative within an award category merits a Codman Award, no award will be presented in that category.
Award recipients
The 2008 award recipients will be notified in January 2009. Each recipient receives a specially designed award that is presented during Joint Commission Resources Annual National Conference, to be held in April 2009. (Note: The National Conference and the Codman Awards presentation moved from November 2008 to April 2009.)
Individual award
Each year, The Joint Commission also offers an award recognizing an individual who has played a significant leadership role in promoting the use of performance measures to improve health care services, or who has made major contributions to the development and testing of performance measures or the science and art of quality improvement. The Ernest Amory Codman Award Evaluation Committee oversees the review process for the individual award.
About Ernest Amory Codman, M.D.
A man of foresight and conviction, Ernest Amory Codman, M.D., was the acknowledged founder of what today is known as outcomes management. It was his lifelong pursuit to establish an “end results system” to track the outcomes of patient treatments as an opportunity to identify clinical misadventures that serve as the foundation for improving the care of future patients. He also believed that all of this information should be made public so that patients could be guided in their choices of physicians and hospitals.
Once a prominent surgeon on the staff of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Codman eventually established his own hospital to pursue the performance measurement and improvement objectives he believed in so fervently. With an almost infinite interest in health care quality, Dr. Codman also helped lead the founding of the American College of Surgeons and its Hospital Standardization Program. That latter entity eventually became The Joint Commission.
For more information
More information is available at www.jointcommission.org/Codman, or by calling Customer Service at (630) 792-5800 weekdays between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. CT.
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