For many years The Joint Commission (TJC) has had “Deemed Status” from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) which means that CMS will accept TJC’s accreditation of a health care provider as proof that they are providing quality service and CMS will pay the health care providers claims for reimbursement. Also for many years, CMS has performed its own ” follow-up” surveys to verify that they agreed with TJC’s assessments. In early 2017 CMS decided that increased attention to ligature attachment points for psychiatric patients was warranted. This prompted TJC to issue the following notice to health care providers and its surveyors regarding an increased emphasis on ligature attachment points with some serious and short-term penalties. To assist with the implementation of this new emphasis, TJC established an “Expert Panel” to assist them and CMS with this process. The November 2017, January and July 2018 Perspectives articles included in this section are the result of that group’s interaction with TJC and CMS in this regard.
The announcement of this process was as follows: CLICK HERE