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Maintaining life-support and non-life-support equipment. What do JCAHO's new requirements mean?
Abstract:
As part of its new "Shared Visions--New Pathways" initiative, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) now requires accredited healthcare facilities to demonstrate that life-support equipment receives a high priority in their equipment-maintenance programs. JCAHO has also revised its overall accreditation scoring system. Some of our member hospitals have asked ECRI for advice on how to deal with these changes. JCAHO's intent, as we understand it, is not to impose burdensome new requirements on hospitals, but simply to ensure that life-support equipment receives the necessary equipment-maintenance priority. We believe that any facility that has been meeting JCAHO's requirements up to now won't need to significantly change its equipment-management program, though it will need to revise its documentation procedures. In this article, we describe the changes to JCAHO's requirements and outline the steps that hospitals need to take to meet the requirements--as well as the steps they don't need to take.
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