... The Joint Commission, for example, likely issued its stamp of approval for the affected hospitals, hospitals who had outsourced their crucial medical records functions to an outside party that sometimes went mute. If someone was injured or died due to this outage, they would not care very much about the supposed advantages.
From the JC's page "About the Joint Commission":
An independent, not-for-profit organization, The Joint Commission accredits and certifies more than 19,000 health care organizations and programs in the United States. Joint Commission accreditation and certification is recognized nationwide as a symbol of quality that reflects an organization’s commitment to meeting certain performance standards.
It's time to up the ante regarding this accreditation body, fully aware of health IT risks (e.g., the Dec 2008 Sentinel Events Alert on Health IT) but to date having done little about them. Through my legal work and my speaking to Plaintiff's attorneys, I am becoming increasingly aware of medical malpractice cases that involve an EHR or related clinical IT systems at JC-accredited organizations.
In effect, the JC has accredited hospitals whose entire clinical command-and-control structure (the term EHR is an anachronism; these systems are in reality enterprise clinical resource management and clinician workflow control devices) can disappear in the blink of an eye, without warning, raising risk to patients greatly.
If I discover that a patient was harmed or killed as a result of, or related to, this massive recent outage of outsourced medical records/workflow control infrastructure, I will be recommending that the Joint Commission, including its leadership, which likely certified the hospital(s) involved for safe operations in areas such as Information Management, be named as defendants.
I have informed the JC leadership by email.
-- SS
