Joint Commission compliance: QA and beyond
January 06, 2020
Joint Commission accreditation remains a crucial element to measure the sheer quality of care. In the Commission’s own words: it wants to provide health care organizations with a proactive approach to designing or redesigning a patient-centered system that aims to improve quality of care and patient safety.
Striving for the highest levels of integration in radiation quality assurance systems is key to sustained quality. The Joint Commission has added several extra accreditation points to its canon. A prominent one related to fluoroscopy standards is the recent requirement to each accredited hospital to establish its own dose thresholds, monitor, and evaluate any instance in which those thresholds were exceeded. Moreover, the healthcare organization must conduct a root cause analysis after a “sentinel event”[1] in prolonged fluoroscopy with a cumulative dose >1500 rads to a single patient and is encouraged to report the event to the Joint Commission.
Qaelum’s DOSE solution has been tailored to accommodate this. By configuring notifications on all crucial markers, DOSE shapes your quality assurance into a proactive learning hub. Customize DOSE in seconds and see all information within the blink of an eye.
With DOSE you set up unique combinations and monitor progress intuitively for key factors like skin dose, air kerma-area product (KAP), air kerma at a reference point, … You can set notifications on individual parameters that exceed a pre-set threshold, but also on cumulative parameters within a specific time interval. Specifically, DOSE helps caregivers track patient’s cumulative radiation dose from multiple examinations. The system enables setting up a threshold and time period after the patient’s first examination, thus creating a standard for monitoring future dose based on your institution’s requirements and/or Joint Commission requirements. Reaching your compliance goals has never been easier.
Whenever the pre-set threshold is exceeded, a notification is generated. This can be accompanied by an email to the person in charge of these events in order to get notified quickly and perform the required actions.
Besides accessing notifications, handling them, and keeping track of the follow-up actions is of crucial importance in evaluating and optimizing procedures. Notifications can be resolved or assigned as tasks to the appropriate expert in your team and actions or observations can be stored e.g., aftercare of the patient, occurrence of skin lesions, providing specific instructions.
DOSE centralizes, analyzes, and reports information you would otherwise have to retrieve in bits and pieces. Keeping track becomes fast and easy, all the information is in one place, and you don’t have to dive into the history of each patient manually.
Learn all about it and book a demo now
Join us at RSNA2019, booth 8303 as we are eager to hear your thoughts on the way forward in quality assurance.
Reference:
[1] The Joint Commission, https://www.jointcommission.org/sentinel_event_policy_and_procedures/’, August 8, 2019
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Eline Van Eldere
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Qaelum INC, US
+1 (212) 933-9475
Scarlette YE
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