Joint Commission Accreditation

For our ambulatory care accreditation program, we use a customer advisory council to give us input on strategic issues in the business environment that affect an organization’s ability to be accredited; since 2007 we’ve had an urgent care provider giving us input on that. In the fall of 2007, we started a two-year process to completely rewrite our standards [the Standards Improvement Initiative]. For that initiative, we had a separate group of 24 ambulatory providers [including urgent care] give us very detailed feedback through multiple live-person and phone-conference meetings.

We know the ambulatory care environment in which we practice in, particularly with specific input from the urgent care field.

In terms of the history of the program, we signed a historic agreement with the [UCAOA] effective July 2008, but we were accrediting urgent care centers ... well before that agreement was put into place. In terms of our history, I would point out that, from the customer’s perspective, the Joint Commission is all about continuous improvement of our own processes as well.

In 2004, the Joint Commission launched the outcome of another couple-year effort called Shared Visions-New Pathway, and that effort completely revamped our onsite survey process, our scoring process [and introduced] the single most-important change in our accreditation process in the last 10 years: the Patient Tracer Method.

For in-depth information on the Patient Tracer Method, read the second installment of Kulczycki’s Q&A, in the May/June issue of ICB.

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