The Joint Commission (TJC) has selected health insights company Apervita to enable thousands of accredited hospitals with ORYX data reporting requirements to directly and more easily submit electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM) data in 2018—a move, TJC officials say—that streamlines an annual process required for hospitals to obtain and maintain accreditation.

“Apervita’s unique platform enables The Joint Commission to move toward a goal of simplified, shared quality improvement tools and processes,” says David Baker, MD, MPH, FACP, executive vice president for Health Care Quality Evaluation, The Joint Commission.

“The ability to receive eCQM data submissions directly from our accredited hospitals has been an important goal for several years. The more we can do to reduce the time, cost, and resources associated with data and submissions, the more we can all focus on continuous quality improvement while keeping pace with the ever-changing demands of the measurement environment,” Baker adds.

The Joint Commission’s rollout of Apervita’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for direct eCQM data submission is underway with more than 500 hospitals participating in the initial implementation.

A Technical Advisory Panel of hospital-based leadership and technical experts are providing input to help ensure the direct submission platform and processes operate efficiently and serve the needs of accredited hospitals, which will be required to submit quality data via eCQMs in 2018.

Until recently, most hospitals manually abstracted data from patient records to compile and submit their quality measures for patient care. Others have moved forward in adopting eCQMs that rely on structured, encoded data present in the electronic health record.  Since the shift to eCQM data submission began two years ago, The Joint Commission has worked to identify a technology platform that would enable hospitals to directly submit eCQM data without retaining a third-party vendor.

“Like The Joint Commission, Apervita believes healthcare organizations need to collaborate with others more easily to meet their strategic goals, and they must be empowered to do far more with far less,” says Paul Magelli, CEO of Apervita. “This partnership exemplifies the spirit of industry cooperation by making a required submission process significantly easier for thousands of accredited hospitals and empowering those enterprises with data to improve their performance.”