Improving America's Hospitals
The Joint Commission's Annual Report on Quality and Safety
View the 2009 Annual Report
Past Reports
Over the past seven years, Joint Commission-accredited hospitals have steadily improved the quality of patient care, saving lives and improving the health of thousands of patients – and the numbers prove it! This report provides scientific evidence of improvements in the care of patients with heart attacks, heart failure, pneumonia, and surgical conditions. Improving America’s Hospitals: The Joint Commission’s Report on Quality and Safety 2009 provides the broadest picture of quality and safety performance ever presented by The Joint Commission.
The fourth annual report shows continual improvement between 2002 and 2008 on 12 quality measures reflecting the best evidence-based treatments for heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia – practices demonstrated by scientific evidence to lead to the best outcomes. The magnitude of national improvement on these measures ranged from 4.9 percent to 58.8 percent. Hospital performance also improved on 13 other measures. Five new measures were introduced in 2008, bringing the total number of Joint Commission measures covered in this report to 31. There are eight measures of care relating to heart attack, four to heart failure, nine to pneumonia, eight to surgical care, and two to children’s asthma care. More than 3,000 Joint Commission-accredited hospitals contributed data.