Surveyors from CMS, The Joint Commission, and other healthcare accreditors are trained to seek and find accreditation violations when they tour a hospital or clinic. And once they find those violations, they have no qualms about reporting noncompliance.
Preparing your hospital for an accreditation survey is stressful, year-round work. Because survey schedules are unannounced, accreditation professionals must always be ready for CMS, The Joint Commission, or other accrediting organizations to show up at their door.
Kurt Patton, MS, RPh, founder and president emeritus of Patton Healthcare Consulting, knows intimately about some of the misunderstood compliance challenges in hospitals today. He catches up with IAQ to talk about some of them in this first part.
