Accreditation

Joint Commission refutes AO conflict of interest study

Briefings on Accreditation and Quality, March 1, 2019

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By Steven Porter, HealthLeaders Media

A study that found independent hospital accreditation carries no real benefit for patient outcomes has garnered a formal rebuttal from The Joint Commission, which argues the researchers reached faulty conclusions due to a number of methodological flaws.

Authors of the original report, published in the BMJ, said their findings show that hospitals accredited by private organizations were no better than those reviewed by a state survey agency, and at least one researcher involved in the project cited it as evidence that the status quo should be upended.

“We need to rethink what private accreditation buys us. It’s a huge industry,” Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH, a professor of global health and health policy at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and a practicing internist at the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, wrote in October in a tweet linking to the report. “We find little evidence that it’s doing patients good.”

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