Why would JCAHO be interested in a national standard?
Selfishly, a national standard is needed to fill out the full range of hospital performance measures. The JCAHO may introduce standards in the pain management area; however, if we don’t know how patients reacted to their pain management plans, we don’t have a good measure of the patients’ hospital experience. • A national standard would help avoid the situation where dueling measures exist and patients and vendors may not know who or what to believe. On the balance, we may learn a great deal from the use of several surveys. • What tools are currently in the public domain? Could questions be added to existing instruments? • When reports are released, what differences really make a difference for audiences such as patients and vendors? We need to spend some time identifying how the hospital data would be used by a variety of audiences. The education process is going to be a very important part of the reporting task. How often should reports be released? • How does AHA present reports? AH
