Effective July 1, The Joint Commission approved revisions to its Disease-Specific Care (DSC) Certification requirements for advanced Inpatient Diabetes Care (IDC) available to accredited hospitals and critical access hospitals. These revisions include the following:
- 12 new elements of performance (EPs)
- 11 revised EPs
- 8 EPs that had full or partial content moved to different standards
The new and revised standards are designed to improve safety and the quality of care for inpatients diagnosed with diabetes. The revised requirements reflect the American Diabetes Association’s 2022 Standards of Medical Care in Diabetes, feedback from Joint Commission customers certified in IDC, and subject matter experts in diabetes care and management. The updates span all five chapters and cover clinical care, information management, performance measurement, program management, and supporting patient self-management.
These changes will apply to all IDC programs seeking initial certification or recertification.
View the prepublication standards.
The Joint Commission’s Comprehensive Cardiac Center (CCC) Certification program has been fully revised to reduce redundancy, clarify requirements, and closely align requirements with other Joint Commission cardiac certification programs for consistency in the review process. The revised requirements will be effective July 1 for CCC-certified hospitals.
View the prepublication standards.
The Joint Commission and the American Heart Association (AHA) have finalized the process for an automatic data transfer from the AHA’s Get with the Guidelines® (GWTG®) – Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) registry directly into the Certification Measure Information Process (CMIP) tool for The Joint Commission’s Comprehensive Heart Attack Center (CHAC) certification program.
This process is available to start with fourth quarter 2022 data.
For the data transfer to take place, an organization needs to ensure that its contract with the AHA permits the sharing of data. Organizations new to joining GWTG-CAD should select the opt-in option within their AHA contract to allow for data sharing with The Joint Commission. Existing organizations should contact certification@heart.org to amend their contract with the AHA to allow for data sharing.
Additionally, many Acute Heart Attack Ready (AHAR) and Primary Heart Attack Center (PHAC) certification programs have already taken advantage of the automatic data transfer process. If an organization has not opted in yet, it should contact certification@heart.org to amend its organization’s contract with the AHA. Manual data entry should continue until confirmation of when the automatic data transfer will begin.
As a reminder, organizations that allow the automatic data transfer from the registry into CMIP should check their data quarterly to ensure data accuracy.
The data transfer schedule is:
- Quarter 1 — June 15
- Quarter 2 — Sept. 15
- Quarter 3 — Dec. 15
- Quarter 4 — March 15
Data needs to be finalized by 11:59 p.m. ET the night before each data transfer date.