Accredited hospitals in America have steadily improved the quality of patient care over a seven-year period, saving lives and improving the health of thousands of patients, according to The Joint Commission’s latest annual report. The report, Improving America’s Hospitals: The Joint Commission’s Report on Quality and Safety 2009, provides scientific evidence of improvements in the care of patients with heart attacks, heart failure, pneumonia, and surgical conditions.

The data shows:

• Hospital performance on two individual measures of quality relating to  inpatient care for childhood asthma is excellent after only one year of  measurement. Specifically, there was 99.8 percent performance on providing  “relievers” to childhood asthma inpatients and 99.1 percent performance on  providing systematic corticosteroids to childhood asthma inpatients.
• The overall heart attack care result improved to 96.7 percent in 2008 from  86.9 percent in 2002. (A 96.7 percent score means that hospitals provided an  evidence-based treatment 967 times for every 1,000 opportunities to do so.)
• The overall heart failure care result improved to 91.6 percent, up from  59.7 percent in 2002, an improvement of 31.9 percentage points.
• The overall 2008 pneumonia care result is 92.9 percent, up from 72.3  percent in 2002 – an improvement of 20.6 percentage points.

Quality, safety and patient satisfaction results for specific hospitals can be found at www.qualitycheck.org. For a complete copy of Improving America’s Hospitals: The Joint Commission’s Report on Quality and Safety 2009, please visit www.jointcommission.org.

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