JCAHO, CMS make performance measures identical

Since January 2004, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have been working together to precisely and completely align their common national hospital performance measures so that they have identical measure documentation and specifications in the areas of acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, pneumonia and surgical infection prevention.

These common measures will now be called Hospital Quality Measures. JCAHO and CMS have released on their respective web sites the Specifications Manual for National Hospital Quality Measures, version 1.0 (2005). This single common measures manual for hospital quality measures is effective with January 2005 hospital discharges.

The specification manual can be found on the Joint Commission web site at: http://www.jcaho.org/pms/core+measures/aligned_manual.htm.