The Joint Commission and National Quality Forum (NQF) today announced the recipients of the 20th John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Awards. The Eisenberg Awards recognize major achievements by individuals and organizations to improve patient safety and healthcare quality.
This year’s recipients in these categories have made improvements in diagnostic safety and the safety of health information technology, addressed social determinants of health, and created advanced patient monitoring systems and alerts. The awardees are:
- Individual Achievement Awardee: Hardeep Singh, MD, MPH, chief of the Health Policy, Quality & Informatics Program in the Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness and Safety at Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center and professor at Baylor College of Medicine
- National Level Innovation in Patient Safety and Quality: Prime Healthcare Services, Improving and Promoting Social Determinants of Health at a System Level
- Local Level Innovation in Patient Safety and Quality: Kaiser Permanente Northern California, Advance Alert Monitor – Automated Early Warning System of Adults at Risk
- Honorary Eisenberg Lifetime Achievement Award: Mark R. Chassin, MD, FACP, MPP, MPH, former president and CEO, The Joint Commission
“The John M. Eisenberg Awards were created to honor the enduring legacy of Dr. Eisenberg,” said David W. Baker, MD, MPH, FACP, Executive Vice President, Division of Healthcare Quality Evaluation, The Joint Commission. “Twenty years later, they continue to showcase how innovation and dedication to process improvement can lead to sustainable solutions to some of healthcare’s greatest challenges. The recipients of this year’s Eisenberg Awards uphold Dr. Eisenberg’s life’s work and those who have come before them in furthering the mission of improving patient safety and quality of care. Congratulations to Dr. Hardeep Singh, Dr. Mark R. Chassin, Prime Healthcare Services and Kaiser Permanente Northern California for being the recipients of the 2021 Eisenberg Awards.”
Learn more about the groundbreaking work completed by the award recipients.
Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology has published new expert guidance highlighting practice recommendations for the prevention of central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs) at a time when hospitals urgently need to strengthen infection prevention programs.
This expert guidance document is sponsored by the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA). It is the product of a collaborative effort led by SHEA, the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC), the American Hospital Association (AHA), and The Joint Commission, with major contributions from representatives of a number of organizations and societies with content expertise.
The CLABSI prevention guide is the first to be published from a series of seven concise, evidence-based practice recommendation guides for acute care hospitals on the prevention of healthcare-associated infections that threaten patient safety.
The Compendium is a multiyear, highly collaborative guidance-writing effort by more than 100 experts from around the world. The 2022 update will include guidance for improving hand hygiene practices in hospitals, and a document on concepts and frameworks to successfully implement healthcare-associated infection prevention practices. The authors note that the Compendium documents may help hospitals restart conversations about quality indicators and remind hospitals to reinforce healthcare-associated infections preventive measures outside of COVID-19.
Each Compendium article provides concise lists and rationale for practical evidence- and consensus-based essential practices, which all acute care hospitals should implement, and additional approaches that hospitals should consider when infections are not controlled by full implementation of essential practices. Some highlights from the updated CLABSI guidance include:
- The subclavian vein is now considered the preferable site for central venous catheter (CVC) insertion in intensive care patients to reduce infectious complications.
- Chlorhexidine-containing dressings are now considered an “essential practice” in patients over two months of age.
- Examples of “additional approaches" to be used by hospitals when CLABSIs are not controlled after implementation of essential practices, include the use of antiseptic- or antimicrobial-impregnated CVCs and the use of antiseptic-containing hub/connector cap/port protectors to cover connectors.
The full suite of Compendium articles scheduled to publish throughout 2022 will include strategies to prevent catheter-associated urinary tract infections, Clostridium difficile infections, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections, surgical site infections, ventilator-associated- pneumonia and -events, and non-ventilator healthcare-associated-pneumonia. Hand hygiene also has a dedicated article. Each Compendium article contains infection prevention strategies, performance measures, and example implementation approaches. Compendium recommendations are derived from a synthesis of systematic literature review and evaluation of the evidence, practical and implementation-based considerations, and expert consensus.
View the Compendium.
Systemic racism exists in healthcare. One such example is a 2016 University of Virginia School of Medicine study that found that some white medical students believed black patients felt less pain than white patients.
Radio Health Journal interviewed Dr. Ana Pujols McKee, Executive Vice President, Chief Medical Officer, Chief Diversity Equity and Inclusion Officer, The Joint Commission, about how systemic racism plays a role in the undertreatment of people of color during an episode titled, “How Systemic Racism Feeds Into Low Quality Health Care.”
“This experience is not limited to black people, but to all people of color – and also to the LGBTQ+ community – [of] a feeling that they are being unfairly treated,” Dr. McKee said.
While she noted that some people of color believe they are being treated fairly and respectfully, “for some, the experience is far from that.”
“It is complicated because these are subtle micro-aggressions that are very difficult to document,” she said. “But we know that when you add that to the bias and the institutional racism that exists, the outcomes could be quite detrimental.”
Also interviewed in the episode is author Taylor Harris, who wonders if her son’s medical condition and challenges would have been approached differently had he been white.
While Dr. Pujols McKee believes education is the primary tool and solution for curing systemic racism, she has not seen a large push from the industry to tackle the topic.
“My goal is for healthcare leaders to see disparities as the quality and patient safety concerns that they are, and that those disparate gaps are treated in the same way that any other adverse event or negative outcome would be treated in the organization,” she said.
Listen to the Radio Health Journal episode.
New Accelerate PI™ Dashboard Reports are available for primary (PSC) and comprehensive (CSC) stroke centers to provide updated performance measurement data on the quality measures selected for advanced PSC and CSC certification programs. The refreshed reports contain data through the third quarter of 2021.
The dashboards provide performance measurement data on all the measures that PSCs and CSCs report using the Certification Measure Information Process (CMIP). The reports are intended to be a springboard for conversations on performance measures and quality improvement during the certification process, as well as a guide to support an organization’s quality journey.
Reports are located under the “Resources and Tools” menu below the DASH heading in Joint Commission Connect®. Users must select “Certification” on the home screen prior to accessing the menu.
A Continuous Customer Engagement (CCE) webinar focused on the exclusive breast milk feeding quality measure is scheduled for May 4 from 9-10 a.m. PT / 10-11 a.m. MT / 11 a.m. to noon CT / noon to 1 p.m. ET.
In January 2020, The Joint Commission launched new performance measure dashboards for hospitals. The dashboards are refreshed with the most recent data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and chart-abstracted and electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM) data reported by hospitals to The Joint Commission under the ORYX® program, as it becomes available. These dashboards help to identify important quality targets and assist organizations in identifying where their performance lags and leads. The Perinatal Care (PC) standard for exclusive breast milk feeding — PC-05 — is a quality measure identified as an area that can be improved.
The aim of this webinar series is to provide an opportunity for all hospitals to learn from peers that have exceled at this topic. Bartlett Regional Hospital and Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital and Medical Center will share their best practices and lessons learned in achieving and sustaining impressive outcomes.
At the end of the session, participants should be able to:
- Apply concepts learned about evidence-based best practices regarding exclusive breast milk feeding for patients in hospitals.
- Identify common performance and outcome challenges in exclusive breast milk feeding for patients in hospitals.
- Prepare to implement at least one new best practice related to exclusive breast milk feeding in the learner’s facility.
The webinar also offers 1.0 Continuing Education (CE) credit for those who:
- Individually register for the webinar.
- Listen to the live webinar in its entirety. Only those listening live during the session will be eligible to receive credit.
- Complete a post-program evaluation/attestation. The program evaluation/attestation link will be sent to your registered email after the webinar.
The webinar recording and slides will be available approximately two hours after the session concludes.
Improvement Insights — Virtual Education Effective for Patient Self-Testing for Warfarin Therapy: A study in the April issue of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety compared a cohort of patients who received in-person International Normalized Ratio (INR) training for Patient Self-Testing (PST) during the last eight months of 2019 (pre-pandemic) with a cohort who received the same training via virtual format during the last eight months of 2020 (during the COVID-19 pandemic) through Acelis Connected Health Services (ACH), writes Erika Leemann Price, MD, MPH.