Measuring perinatal care performance: Joint commission expands requirements bulletin board

摘要

Iate last year, the Joint Commission announced hat it will expand performance measurement equirements for accredited general medical/ surgical hospitals from four to six core measure sets. The additional requirements will take effect January 1, 2014. For hospitals with 1,100 or more births per year, the perinatal care measure set will become the mandatory fifth measure set. The perinatal care core measure set includes the following: elective delivery, cesarean birth, antenatal steroids, health care-associated bloodstream infections in newborns and exclusive breast milk feeding. The Joint Commission chose the perinatal care measure set because of the high volume of births in the United States (4 million per year) and because it affects a significant portion of accredited hospitals. The Joint Commission will monitor the threshold of 1,100 births over the first four to eight quarters of data collection to reassess ongoing applicability. The Joint Commission expects that this threshold will be modified over time so that more hospitals are included and strongly encourages hospitals to consider adopting this measure set before the required effective date of January 1,2014.