Clinical engineers are usually familiar with the accreditation requirements that are specific to their department; they should also be familiar with organization-wide standards that may affect their operations. For example, JCAHO utility-management requirements may not be the responsibility of clinical engineers, yet the requirements may affect proper operation of equipment. The JCAHO has included patient safety and clinical engineering-related standards since its first published standards in 1953. Acute care hospitals are not the only organizations accredited by the JCAHO. Accreditation is also available through the JCAHO for the following enterprises:
● Psychiatric, children’s, critical access, and rehabilitation hospitals ● Home care organizations, including those that provide home infusion and durable medical equipment services ● Nursing homes and other long term care facilities ● Behavioral health care organizations ● Ambulatory care providers, outpatient surgery facilities, rehabilitation centers, infusion centers, group practices as well as office-based surgery ● Clinical laboratories, including blood-transfusion and donor centers.
The JCAHO is supported by the American Hospital Association, American Medical Association, American College of Physicians, American Society of Internal Medicine, American College of Surgeons, and American Dental Association. Nurses are have an atlarge representative. The JCAHO has integrated patient safety and elements of risk management into its performance improvement standards. The 2004 JCAHO risk management-related standards include the requirement for health care organizations to manage safety by identifying risks, and planning and implementing processes to minimize the likelihood of those risks causing incidents. The standards further require that the organization conduct proactive risk assessments that evaluate the potential adverse affects of equipment on the safety and health of patients. In addition, organizations must define and implement an ongoing, proactive program for identifying and reducing unanticipated adverse events and safety
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risks to patients. The commission believes that “such initiatives have the obvious advantage of preventing adverse events rather than simply reacting when they occur. This approach also avoids the barriers to understanding created by hindsight bias and the fear of disclosure, embarrassment, blame, and punishment that can happen after an event.” The performance improvement process is composed of the following activities:
● Collection of data to monitor performance ● Systematic aggregation and analysis of data, with analysis of undesirable patterns or trends in performance ● Implementation of processes for identifying and managing sentinel events ● Use of information from data analysis to make changes that improve performance and patient safety and reduce the risk of sentinel events
Organizational performance improvement requirements for the collection of patient safety data include gathering staff perceptions of risks to patients and suggestions for improving patient safety, as well as staff willingness to report unanticipated adverse events. JCAHO outlines the following proactive performance improvement activities to reduce risks to patients:
1. Select a high-risk process (i.e., a process that if not planned and/or implemented correctly, has a significant potential for impacting the safety of the patient, to be analyzed). 2. Describe the chosen process (e.g., through the use of a flowchart). 3. Identify the ways in which the process could break down (i.e., the failure modes or fail to perform its desired function). 4. Identify the possible effects that a breakdown or failure of the process could have on patients and their potential severity. 5. Prioritize the potential process breakdowns or failures. 6. Determine why the prioritized breakdowns or failures could occur, this may include performing a hypothetical root cause analysis. 7. Redesign a risky process and/or underlying systems to minimize the risk patients. 8. Test and implement the redesigned process. 9. Monitor the effectiveness of the redesigned process (JCAHO, 2004).