Joint Commission Accreditation, Part 3

“Let me count the ways in which accreditation has now moved to the forefront of thinking, by owners and operators of urgent care centers, by payers, and by other stakeholders in this time of emerging healthcare reform,” said Michael Kulczycki, MBA, executive director of the Ambulatory Care Accreditation Program of the Joint Commission.

“Joint Commission accreditation is all about patient safety. So centers turn to The Joint Commission to receive an outside evaluation of their patient safety and quality efforts, to assure themselves of this question: “Are we doing all we can to provide high quality, and safe patient care?”

Joint Commission accreditation is about sending a message to your staff and your physicians, that performing at the highest level of excellence is important to you, and that putting a center to the test from an outside evaluator demonstrates that higher level of excellence.

Accreditation provides a feeling of prestige to the owners and staff of an urgent care center, a mark of distinction in your local community of “taking it to the next level” that not many other providers of primary care have achieved.

Payers are turning to accreditation as a “ticket for admission” into networks, and as a substitute for payers’ own direct oversight via onsite inspections.

Emergency room over-utilization is now capturing the attention of health policy makers and payers, so these stakeholders are looking for appropriate, credible sources for delivering primary care. Accreditation establishes a recognized level of quality for delivering care in settings such as urgent care or convenient care—both markets in which the leading providers are seeking and using Joint Commission accreditation to provide credibility, comparable to the recognition achieved in the hospital setting.

In Jan. 2009, Joint Commission released a standards applicability grid, developed in conjunction with the Quality Standards Committee of UCAOA, to guide agreement on which ambulatory standards were applicable for evaluating urgent care centers. 

In Oct. 2009, Joint Commission Resources, the publishing arm for The Joint Commission, will release a version of its ambulatory care standards exclusively designed for urgent care centers, “2010 Standards for Urgent Care.”

Michael Kulczycki, MBA, is executive director of the Ambulatory Care Accreditation Program of the Joint Commission.

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