Emory partners with JCAHO
in new health care academy
Emory is joining with the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare
Organizations (JCAHO) and three other insitutions-Northwestern University,
Ohio State University and the University of Pennsylvania-to develop a corporate
"university without walls."
JCAHO is familiar to most clinicians and health care faculty as the nation's
oldest and largest standards-setting and accrediting body in health care.
Committed to improving the quality of health care through accreditation
and related services to support performance improvement, JCAHO evaluates
and accredits more than 18,000 health care organizations and programs in
the United States, including 11,000 hospitals and home health agencies.
The mission of the new Academy for Healthcare Quality is to improve the
quality of health care provided to the public by presenting a rigorous and
consistent curriculum on quality evaluation, quality management and quality
improvement to health care professionals. The academy will offer graduate-level
continuing professional education and certification programs for health
care executives, practitioners, consultants, corporate benefits managers,
third-party payers and government regulators.
"The opportunity to be an integral part of the development of the
Academy for Healthcare Quality and uniting with such prestigious and honorable
partners is an exciting venture," said Michael Johns, executive vice
president for health affairs. "We are looking forward to sharing our
educational resources for the purpose of creating an entity dedicated to
the improvement of health care."
The Emory component of the academy will be coordinated by the Center
for Healthcare Leadership at the School of Medicine. The center designs
and coordinates a variety of continuing medical and executive educational
programs at Emory and elsewhere.
In addition to members of the Center for Healthcare Leadership, other
university faculty will contribute significantly to the academy's curriculum.
This curriculum will focus on topics key to the performance of leaders,
managers and evaluators of health care, and topics closely related to JCAHO
accreditation standards, which identify functions that most powerfully and
directly influence the delivery of high-quality health services and produce
optimal patient outcomes in health care settings of all types.
There will be four broad subject areas: the health care environment,
organization management and leadership, patient care delivery processes,
and organization evaluation and change management.
The first students will be JCAHO surveyors. They will test continuing
professional education programs involving face-to-face seminars and state-of-the-art
distance and accelerated learning strategies. Public enrollment of health
care professionals from a variety of fields will follow shortly. A certification
and recertification examination accredited by the National Commission of
Certifying Agencies will test and recognize mastery of requisite performance
skills by awarding the credential "Diplomate of the Academy."
For more information about the new Academy for Healthcare Quality, contact
Charles Frame, managing director, Center for Healthcare Leadership, at 320-0032
or chip_frame@bus.emory.edu.
-Lorri Preston Return
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