Joint Commission Dives Into the Digital Age: 3 Big Updates
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content.
The Joint Commission—the health care industry's oldest, largest accreditation and certification organization—is taking bold steps to modernize its standards and processes.
Since early May, the organization has announced two high-tech partnerships and introduced a new standard for health care accreditation, driven by data analytics.
"This is going to be a really exciting year," Dr. Jonathan Perlin, president and CEO of The Joint Commission, told Newsweek in an exclusive interview on June 20.
Perlin took the helm in March of 2022, and was joined by a string of new leaders in the spring of 2024, including fresh appointments to the financial, medical, product development and international teams.
"The team that we've built is, substantially, a new team," Perlin told Newsweek. "All of us have come from operational leadership roles—and we're clinicians—and so we're bringing our understanding of the new realities of health care."
The Joint Commission is launching new partnerships and programs to drive efficiency and prioritize data analytics, President and CEO Dr. Jonathan Perlin told Newsweek.
The Joint Commission is launching new partnerships and programs to drive efficiency and prioritize data analytics, President and CEO Dr. Jonathan Perlin told Newsweek.
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As The Joint Commission's leadership looks towards the future, they aim to uphold the public trust the organization has established, Perlin added. But they want to do so more efficiently: not only evaluating health care providers, but proactively enabling them to achieve higher outcomes.
"We see [The Joint Commission] doing that increasingly by introducing tools that make the reporting burden lower and the value of information higher," he said.
Here are three recent updates from the body that evaluates more than 23,000 health care organizations and programs and over 80 percent of hospitals across the U.S., explained.
1. Accreditation 360
The Joint Commission launched "Accreditation 360" on June 30. This "new standard" for health care accreditation, as the organization calls it, will use data analytics to fine-tune its focus on benchmarking and outcomes.
This "smarter, lighter" accreditation package will roll out two new tools to health care organizations. First, an updated accreditation manual will more clearly identify Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' (CMS) Conditions of Participation (CoPs). Other requirements and National Patient Safety goals will be funneled into The Joint Commission's National Performance Goals (NPGs).
Second, a continuous engagement model will be made available to health care organizations, making it easier for them to seek ongoing support and prepare for The Joint Commission's survey.
The Joint Commission has also taken steps to simplify its process: removing 714 requirements from the hospital accreditation program and streamlining accreditation requirements into 14 NPGs.
"Healthcare organizations today are navigating historic complexity, and the pressures are enormous," Perlin said in the organization's news release. "Healthcare is also changing, and Joint Commission must change, too."
To round out Accreditation 360, The Joint Commission's affiliate, The National Quality Forum, is introducing a new certification program focused on outcome measures in maternity care, and procedural care for hip and knee, spine and cardiovascular services.
And finally, in a move to improve transparency, The Joint Commission will make standards publicly searchable online by July. Its new Survey Analysis for Evaluating STrengths (SAFEST) Program will highlight practices at accredited organizations, ultimately organizing them into a database of best practices that can be used for collaboration and learning across the industry.
"This new model reflects a deep understanding of the pressures we face and offers a more collaborative, outcomes-focused approach to accreditation that helps us better serve our patients and communities," said Laura Kaiser, president and CEO of St. Louis-based SSM Health.
2. Palantir Partnership
The Joint Commission announced its partnership with Palantir Technologies on May 8, intending to use the tech giant's data analytics and artificial intelligence tools to benchmark quality and drive safety improvements at health care organizations.
"Palantir provides tools to make operations and processes more efficient," Perlin said, "so it is really helping us improve our mechanisms for data acquisition, data management and some optimized performance internally within The Joint Commission."
Palantir won't have access to The Joint Commission's data, according to Perlin. Their work will be focused on operational processes, like optimizing surveyor schedules. Plus, Palantir's AI tools can help locate data that may not be standardized, allowing The Joint Commission to answer questions more accurately.
For example, if The Joint Commission is looking at blood pressure control during delivery on a maternity unit, blood pressure metrics may be recorded in a specific field, or they may be hidden in a free-text patient description. AI can help surface all of that data to determine whether the maternity unit adequately controlled patients' blood pressure.
"We see Palantir as a set of tools for us to better support safety and performance improvement—without relinquishing the data to them," Perlin said.
3. Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) Partnership
In June, The Joint Commission teamed up with CHAI—a group of more than 3,000 health care organizations and stakeholders, collaborating on guidelines for responsible health AI use—to establish a "suite" of AI best practices playbooks and a new certification for hospitals.
"CHAI's lane is really the technology itself, and ours is the organization's governance process for the responsible use of that," Perlin said.
He identified three components that are expected to guide the new certification: Is the tool technically valid and reliable? Does it surface the right clinical information? And is it being deployed in the right way (AI tools trained to detect sepsis in adults shouldn't be applied to children, for example).
"Organizations can independently set up what they think to be best practices for responsible governance and oversight," Perlin said. "Having come from operations and large systems myself, it's really important to have a set of externally validated standards that demonstrate what 'good' looks like for responsible governance and oversight."
The partners' first guidance will be available in fall 2025, followed by the AI certification.
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