The Joint Commission has released its annual report summarizing data on 49 accountability measures reported by more than 3,300 Joint Commission-accredited hospitals in 2014. America’s Hospitals: Improving Quality and Safety: The Joint Commission’s Annual Report 2015 indicates how well hospitals are performing on a range of evidence-based care processes for treatment of conditions such as heart attack, pneumonia, and stroke. The report is available for download on The Joint Commission website.

The report also includes those institutions marked as Top Performer on Key Quality Measures in 2014. This year, 1,043 accredited hospitals (31.5%) qualified as a Top Performer. The designation identifies hospitals with excellent performance on accountability measures for heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, perinatal care, surgical care, children’s asthma care, inpatient psychiatric services, venous thromboembolism (VTE) care, stroke care and immunization. For the first time, the 2015 report also incorporates accountability measure sets for tobacco treatment, substance use, and inpatient psychiatric services.

“Led by this year’s Top Performer hospitals, Joint Commission-accredited hospitals have achieved tremendous improvement and reliability on many of the measures reported over the past 5 years,” saidMark R. Chassin, MD, president and CEO of The Joint Commission. “These Top Performer hospitals are demonstrating how to achieve and sustain superb levels of performance in delivering evidence-based treatments.”

According to The Joint Commission, facilities qualifying as a 2014 Top Performer on Key Quality Measures must meet a range of requirements:

  • Achieve cumulative performance of 95% or above across all reported accountability measures
  • Achieve performance of 95% or above on each and every reported accountability measure with at least 30 denominator cases
  • Have at least one core measure set that had a composite rate of 95% or above, and within that measure set, achieve a performance rate of 95% or above on all applicable individual accountability measures.

To review quality, safety, and patient satisfaction results for individual facilities, visit the Quality Check website.