Facts about the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare
Established in 2009, the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare aims to solve health care’s most critical safety and quality problems. The Center’s participants – the nation’s leading hospitals and health systems – use a systematic approach to analyze specific breakdowns in care and discover their underlying causes to develop targeted solutions that solve these complex problems. In keeping with its objective to transform health care into a high reliability industry, The Joint Commission will share these proven effective solutions with the more than 18,000 health care organizations it accredits and certifies.
The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare is introducing a first of its kind approach to identify, create and implement durable solutions that address quality and safety challenges facing health care organizations. These challenges threaten lives and increase costs. The Center uses Lean Six Sigma and change management tools and methods to identify the most pressing safety problems, measure their impact, discover their causes, develop specific solutions that are targeted to each important cause, and thoroughly test the solutions in real-life situations. The Center relies on the extensive reach of The Joint Commission to ensure that health care organizations benefit directly from Center solutions, and that Center solutions become an essential part of how Joint Commission customers achieve excellence in health care quality and safety.
Historically, The Joint Commission has led the way nationally and internationally to identify the highest priority health care quality and safety problems and to address them. With National Patient Safety Goals, core measures, and state-of-the-art accreditation standards, hospitals and other health care organizations know where they should be focusing their efforts to gain the greatest improvements in safety and quality. Many already devote sizable resources to this end. Yet, major shortfalls in quality and safety persist. The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare addresses critical safety and quality problems, such as health care-associated infection, hand-off communication, wrong site surgery, and surgical site infection. Although there is considerable agreement on the importance of these problems and on some strategies to address them, there is an even stronger demand for specific guidance on how to solve them. Health care organizations want highly effective, durable solutions that are ready to implement. The Center for Transforming Healthcare presents a new approach to achieve the magnitude and breadth of improvement that is sought by The Joint Commission, by health care organizations, by patients and their families, by physicians and other clinicians, and by other public and private stakeholders.
Proven effective solutions
The Center is developing solutions through the application of the same Robust Process Improvement™ (RPI) methods and tools that other industries have long relied on to improve quality, safety and efficiency. The leading hospitals and health systems in the Center’s network have a great deal of experience using RPI methods and tools, such as Lean Six Sigma, in the health care environment. Currently, the lack of convincing data is a key weakness in the effort to improve safety and quality. Because Lean Six Sigma projects are driven by reliable measurements, they provide an ideal source of data on the ultimate impact of the solutions that emanate from them. In third quarter 2010, The Joint Commission Connect extranet will provide all Joint Commission accredited organizations with access to a new application called the Targeted Solutions Tool™ that will provide a customized set of solutions targeted to the organization’s specific demographics – at no additional cost.
Leadership Advisory Council
Progress of the Center is guided by a Leadership Advisory Council, which was formed in July 2010. The Council comprises leaders from among the Center’s major sponsors and CEOs representing the participating hospitals. The CEOs serve on a rotating basis to allow new membership each year. The Council is chaired by Mark Chassin, M.D., M.P.P., M.P.H., president of The Joint Commission and the initial members are: Jack Bailey (GlaxoSmithKline), Paul Chaffin (Ecolab), George Halvorson (Kaiser Permanente), Donny Lambeth (Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center), Alberto Mas (BD), Rich Miller (Virtua), Andy Mills (Medline Industries), Ron Peterson (The John Hopkins Hospital and Health System), Gary Pruden (Johnson & Johnson Company), Tom Priselac (Cedars-Sinai Health System), Richard Umbdenstock (American Hospital Association), Mark Vachon (GE Healthcare), and Dan Wolterman (Memorial Hermann Healthcare System).
Center support
The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit affiliate of The Joint Commission. The Center is grateful for the generous leadership and support of the American Hospital Association, BD, Ecolab, GE Healthcare, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Johnson & Johnson, and Medline Industries, as well as the support of the Federation of American Hospitals, and GOJO Industries, Inc..
Project teams
The Center’s network of participating hospitals and health systems includes the following organizations:
Hand hygiene
- Cedars-Sinai Health System, California
- Exempla Healthcare, Colorado
- Froedtert Hospital, Wisconsin
- Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System, Maryland
- Memorial Hermann Healthcare System, Texas
- Trinity Health, Michigan
- Virtua, New Jersey
- Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, North Carolina
Hand-off communications
- Exempla Healthcare, Colorado
- Fairview Health Services, Minnesota
- Intermountain Healthcare, Utah
- Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System, Maryland
- Kaiser Permanente, California and Oregon
- Mayo Clinic, Minnesota
- NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, New York
- North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, New York
- Partners HealthCare System, Massachusetts
- Stanford Hospital & Clinics, California
Rhode Island Universal Protocol Project
- Newport Hospital, Rhode Island
- Rhode Island Hospital, Rhode Island
- The Miriam Hospital, Rhode Island
These hospitals are part of the Lifespan health system
Surgical site infections
- Cedars-Sinai Health System, California
- Cleveland Clinic, Ohio
- Mayo Clinic, Minnesota
- North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, New York
- Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Illinois
- OSF Saint Francis Medical Center, Illinois
- Stanford Hospital & Clinics, California
In collaboration with the American College of Surgeons