Accreditation

Crucial accreditation deadlines on the horizon for pain management and emergency preparedness

Accreditation Insider, August 15, 2017

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Time is running out to meet the new emergency management (EM) Conditions of Participation (CoP) and The Joint Commission’s revised pain management standards. The EM Interpretive Guidelines go into effect on November 15 while the pain management standards go into effect January 1.

Emergency management

The new EM CoPs fill gaps CMS’ previous regulations by compelling hospitals to communicate and coordinate their emergency plans with other healthcare organizations and government agencies. They also require regular emergency preparedness training with staff and disaster contingency planning.

Steve MacArthur, a safety consultant at The Greeley Company, pointed out that a lot of the new requirements include things that hospitals should have already been doing.

“While this rule is new to the ‘marketplace,’ there are really no new concepts contained therein,” he says. “This may provide some guidance for CMS surveyors as they drill down on organizational preparedness activities. But none of this is groundbreaking or in any way representative of a change in how hospitals have done, and will continue to do, business. [It’s] just another set of official ‘eyes’ looking through the compliance microscope.”

Pain management

The Joint Commission prepublished its new pain management standards back in June. The accreditor said it used the revision to address disparities between its standards and what the literature recommended. Some of the changes include:

•    Enabling clinician access to prescription drug monitoring program databases

•    Performance improvement activities focusing on pain assessment and management to increase the safety and quality for patients

•    Identifying the leader or leadership team responsible for pain management and safe opioid prescribing

•    Involving patients in developing their treatment plans and setting realistic expectations and measurable goals

•    Identifying and monitoring high-risk patients as a way to promote safe opioid use

Facilities should assign teams to research best practices in pain management, get the medical staff working on revising protocols and deter¬mining how to gather data on pain management effectiveness, and alert your information technology and electronic health records experts that they will be needed.

The annual fire and smoke door testing requirements will also be due by January 2018.



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