The Joint Commission: hospitals make strides on core measures with more achieving "top performer" status.

Performance on key quality measures continues to improve at more than 3,300 accredited hospitals, according to new data from The Joint Commission (TJC). In its 2014 annual report, the Oakbrook Terrace, IL, accrediting agency, said that more than a third of the country's accredited hospitals are now top performers in TJC's core measures program. This is a marked increase from 2002 when the top performer program was first initiated and just 7% of hospitals achieved top performer status on a much smaller range of quality metrics. To be recognized as a top performer, TJC stipulates that hospitals must achieve a cumulative performance of 95% or greater on all reported accountability measures, achieve a performance of 95% or greater on every accountability measure where there are at least 30 denominator cases, and have at least one core measure set that has a composite rate of at least 95%--and all metrics within that measure set must rank at 95% or above as well. The number of academic medical centers recognized as top performers grew from 24, recognized in last year's annual report, to 35 in the 2014 report, now representing 29% of all accredited academic medical centers. Only 11% of the top performing hospitals were public hospitals, designated as "government owned" in the annual report. The TJC suggests that this indicates that performance improvement needs to be prioritized at these hospitals. TJC is providing special recognition to 44 top performing hospitals that went beyond the minimum requirements, reporting on five or more sets of measures, and achieved top performer recognition on that expanded set of measures.