In late August, the oldest of the accrediting organizations released its 2020 HFAP Quality Review, highlighting the problems and trends identified by surveyors during on-site visits in 2019 at acute care hospitals, critical access hospitals, laboratories, and ambulatory surgery centers.

The approval provides another option for the nation’s more than 600 psychiatric hospitals, said Patrick Horine, president of DNV-GL, the only for-profit AO of the four authorized to accredit acute care hospitals overall. Unlike the others, DNV-GL surveys hospitals at least once every three years, as required by CMS, but then also visits hospitals in each off year to ensure they are maintaining patient safety.

Throughout the memo, CMS notes that surveys should resume primarily in areas that have entered the White House’s Phase 3 of reopening—which can vary from region to region—and that individual facilities can ask for delays if they are experiencing a surge in COVID-19 cases. Many surveys may still focus primarily on infection control and conditions that pose an immediate jeopardy to patients or staff, as they have throughout the PHE.

As in 2019, care management problems led the list of sentinel events. That same year, ,TJC grouped different categories together. The care management category,. including falls, delays in treatment and medication management errors.

The waivers modify or temporarily suspend certain CMS and HHS regulatory requirements as long as the PHE is ongoing. Hospitals, for instance, have used the blanket waivers to expand the use of telehealth, delay some testing and maintenance of non-critical systems, and use temporary facilities as ways to ease the financial and daily burden of meeting the surge of COVID-19 patients.

The last time TJC was renewed as a hospital AO was in 2014, for a six-year period. That ran out as of July 15, 2020. In a special filing in the July 15, 2020, Federal Register, CMS published a notice that TJC had been approved as a hospital AO through July 15, 2022.

The Joint Commission has updated several of its hospital accreditation standards, primarily related to last year’s long-awaited revisions to the CMS Conditions of Participation (CoP) on burden reduction and discharge planning.

All four hospital accrediting organizations followed CMS in March in announcing a suspension of regular survey activity as the coronavirus pandemic swept the nation. Complaint surveys have continued as needed. And at the urging of CMS, were to continue to conduct initial accreditation surveys for new healthcare facilities as a way to increase patient capacity during the COVID-19 national emergency.

Delivering the opening remarks at the 2020 CMS Quality Conference in Washington, D.C., Verma said her agency is “looking at ways to enhance our oversight of accrediting organizations.”

For a willful violation, in which an employer knowingly failed to comply with an OSHA standard or demonstrated a plain indifference for employee safety, the minimum penalty increases from $9,472 to $9,639 and the maximum penalty increases from $132,598 to $134,937;