A Joint Commission roundtable recently called for the development of a national performance measurement data strategy. The press release says that most performance measurement efforts operate in isolation from one another and rarely provide a consistent picture of overall quality.
The development of this initiative should be exciting for healthcare facility designers. Once, realized, these connected data sets should be a great evidence-based design tool. How I envision it is that we’ll be able to link built environment factors to any other healthcare fields that The Joint Commission standards cover.

Unfortunately the white paper (see image at right) that The Commission has published doesn’t go into specific areas of data exactly, so I’m not totally sure if it will cover the built environment.

I sent The Commission’s media contact a question about this; here’s what he said.

The paper doesn’t address specific measures or specific data–it addresses how data should be able to be collected and linked to enable stakeholders to assess and improve quality. If one wanted to link data from measures of the environment to patient care outcomes data, then having a performance measurement data infrastructure should allow you to do that.

So we’ll have to follow this and see what happens.