Improving America's Hospitals

The Joint Commission's Annual Report on Quality and Safety

View the Annual Report

Over the past six years, Joint Commission-accredited hospitals have made quality and safety a priority—and the numbers prove it!  This report presents scientific evidence of improvement and how it relates to common medical conditions and procedures.  Improving America’s Hospitals: The Joint Commission’s Report on Quality and Safety 2008 provides the broadest picture of quality and safety performance ever presented by The Joint Commission.

This report documents how well hospitals have performed in treating heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia and in providing surgical care; 25 individual measures are tracked from one to six years. In addition, hospital performance against 2007 National Patient Safety Goals (NPSGs) is reviewed, as well as NPSG performance trends back to 2003. Joint Commission hospitals showed improvement on all measures tracked from 2006 to 2007, as well as steady, cumulative quality improvement from 2002 to 2007.