Dive Brief:
- JLL’s healthcare division on Tuesday launched a compliance solution that’s intended to help healthcare organizations meet new requirements for accreditation at their facilities.
- The Accreditation Lifecycle Program, or ALG, is designed to give healthcare organizations a map for managing regulatory and accreditation requirements that, under recent changes, require continuous readiness surveys rather than a traditional one-time assessment, the company said in a release.
- “Healthcare systems face immense pressure to reduce costs and navigate complex regulations while enhancing the patient and care team experience,” Cheryl Carron, chief operating officer of Work Dynamics Americas and president of the healthcare division at JLL, said in a statement. “Our Accreditation Lifestyle Program acts as a strategic partner, delivering solutions that keep patient care at the heart of decision-making while transforming compliance management from an obligation into a competitive advantage.”
Dive Insight:
Starting this year, The Joint Commission, or TJC, launched Accreditation 360, a standard that revamps how hospitals are to meet accreditation and certification processes. It includes adoption of National Fire Protection Association codes, streamlines rules for management of the physical environment and puts an emphasis on survey readiness.
The Joint Commission is a nonprofit that accredits more than 23,000 U.S. healthcare organizations and programs. The majority of state governments recognize the organization’s accreditation as a condition for licensure for the receipt of Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements.
Under the revised accreditation standards, it becomes important for hospitals to pay attention to new provisions, like the NFPA codes. “One slip up with any line in a fully adopted code means surveyors have the authority to cite for deficiencies,” J.J. Keller Consulting Services says in a blog post. Hospitals also must become more familiar with changes that combine the Environment of Care and Life Safety chapters, which now form one chapter, called Physical Environments, the consulting firm says.
The TJC change provides meaningful benefits, including fewer standards that should reduce paperwork burdens in the long term, less redundancies in standards and best-practice resources that hospitals can use to learn from their peers and improve performance, J.J. Keller said. The standard also underscores a focus on “continued survey readiness” that is expected to minimize survey disruptions,
Although the changes could mean less burdensome compliance over time, staff will need to adapt to unfamiliar standards, get retrained and start interpreting broader requirements and get infrastructure set up to track outcome measures, the consulting firm said.
“Organizations participating in the [The Joint Commission] program must map out an action plan now to tackle necessary procedural shifts,” Brightly Software, a Siemens company that provides compliance software to healthcare facilities, said in a post. “By digitizing critical compliance-related activities, teams can help minimize costs, streamline compliance, and reduce risk through smarter facilities and asset management.”
JLL solution
JLL’s new accreditation solution is structured as a comprehensive, multi-year framework that mirrors the Joint Commission accreditation cycle to ensure healthcare organizations maintain continuous survey readiness while strengthening their compliance infrastructure. Meanwhile, phased implementation tailors the program intensity and focuses on each client’s specific timeline and readiness level, JLL said.
This shift is intended to eliminate unplanned capital expenditures, reduce operational disruptions and create predictable compliance management across distributed healthcare portfolios, JLL said.
“Accreditation risk is an enterprise-level exposure that can impact an organization’s entire operation," Carey Sealy, managing director of JLL Healthcare’s Advanced Technology Group Enterprise Services, said in a statement.
“Healthcare systems are trapped in reactive 90-to-120-day survey panic cycles that produce repeated findings, unplanned capital expenditures and operational disruptions,” Sealy said. “Our Accreditation Lifecycle Program mitigates this enterprise-wide risk by delivering structured, programmatic support with the resources, tools and expertise to build sustainable readiness and achieve success the first time around.”
JLL’s ATG Intelligence platform helps accomplish this by centralizing drawings, inventory, inspections and corrections with support from certified healthcare facility management professionals to deliver “automated, always-on documentation, real-time system-wide dashboards, and digital audit trails that ensure survey readiness across properties at any time,” JLL said. “This technology-enabled approach replaces manual spreadsheets and disconnected systems with integrated workflows that provide enterprise-wide visibility and control.”
Earlier this year, JLL announced it was partnering with smart IoT device maker Hexmodal to automate compliance testing for healthcare facilities. The goal of the agreement is to automate traditional manual testing processes by using Hexmodal’s smart life safety devices for continuous monitoring of safety equipment including fire extinguishers, emergency lighting, exit signs, temperature monitors and leak detectors, JLL said.
Aging facilities and infrastructure is a leading concern for 80% of healthcare operators surveyed by the American Society for Healthcare Engineering, JLL said in its release. Meanwhile, workforce challenges sit as a top concern for health systems and operators, compounding the difficulty of maintaining specialized compliance expertise, JLL said.
