OAKBROOK TERRACE, IL--(Marketwire - October 28, 2010) - The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare today announced the establishment of a Leadership Advisory Council to guide the progress of the Center as it addresses and develops solutions to improve health care quality and patient safety. The first meeting of the Center's Leadership Advisory Council will be held October 29.
Meeting three times a year, members of the Leadership Advisory Council include executives from among the Center's major sponsors and CEOs representing the participating hospitals. The CEOs will serve on a rotating basis to allow new membership each year. The Council will be chaired by Mark Chassin, M.D., M.P.P., M.P.H., president, The Joint Commission. Council members are:
- Jack E. Bailey, GlaxoSmithKline
- Paul Chaffin, Ecolab
- George Halvorson, Kaiser Permanente
- Donny C. Lambeth, Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center
- Alberto Mas, BD
- Rich Miller, Virtua
- Andy Mills, Medline Industries
- Ronald R. Peterson, The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System
- Thomas M. Priselac, Cedars-Sinai Health System
- Gary Pruden, Johnson & Johnson Company
- Michael J. Swinford, GE Healthcare
- Richard Umbdenstock, American Hospital Association
- Dan Wolterman, Memorial Hermann Healthcare System
"The response from accredited health care organizations to the Center has been extremely positive, a fact due in large part to the ongoing commitment of participating hospitals and health systems and sponsors to address the toughest and most persistent problems facing health care across the country," says Dr. Chassin. "The perspectives of the Leadership Advisory Council members will help us to bring everyone interested in safe, reliable health care together to create lasting solutions."
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 -- which include some of 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. Center projects include hand hygiene, wrong-site surgery, hand-off communications and the reduction of surgical site infections (SSI) following colorectal surgery. Future projects are expected to focus on preventable hospitalizations, medication errors, and other aspects of infection control.
All Joint Commission-accredited health care organizations can access the solutions on their secure Joint Commission Connect extranet through the Targeted Solutions Tool™ (TST). The TST provides a step-by-step process to measure performance, identify barriers to excellent performance, and implement the Center's proven solutions that are customized to address an organization's specific barriers.
The first set of targeted solutions, created by eight hospitals and health care systems working in collaboration with the Center, focuses on improving hand hygiene. The second set of solutions, announced last week, focuses on improving hand-off communications. The targeted solutions for hand-off communications will be pilot tested to prove their effectiveness in demographically diverse hospitals and will be added to the TST in the second half of 2011.
For more information about the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare, visit www.centerfortransforminghealthcare.org.
Established in 2009, the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare aims to transform American health care into a high-reliability industry that ensures patients receive the safest, highest quality care they expect and deserve. The Center's participants -- the nation's leading hospitals and health systems -- use a proven, systematic approach to analyze specific breakdowns in care and discover their underlying causes to develop targeted solutions for health care's most critical safety and quality problems. The Center is a not-for-profit affiliate of The Joint Commission, which shares the Center's proven effective solutions with its more than 18,000 accredited health care organizations. Learn more about the Center at www.centerfortransforminghealthcare.org.
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