Many teams at AAMC are accredited by professional associations.

Government agencies, national sanctioning bodies, state associations, and private independent survey firms regularly evaluate AAMC’s quality-of-care performance across a wide range of criteria. Some of these criteria go beyond just facts and figures to measure how well a hospital manages the interpersonal aspects of patient care.

In some instances, these evaluations are compared with performance data from other hospitals across the state or across the country. In other cases, sanctioning bodies establish quality and safety benchmarks, which hospitals are required to meet or exceed in order to earn and maintain an accredited status.

Finally, AAMC has an extensive internal network of processes and mechanisms that act as checkpoints and yardsticks for monitoring and measuring quality standards. To learn more about those, see “How AAMC’s processes overlap to reinforce the focus on quality”.

Organizations that recognize AAMC’s quality:

• Joint Commission
• Jackson Organization
• Maryland Hospital Association

The Joint Commission

The Joint Commission is an independent, not-for-profit body that established standards for quality and standards. The Joint Commission conducts regular, on-site surveys of hospitals, evaluating a wide range of criteria. The results of these surveys determine whether a hospital earns accreditation from the Joint Commission. AAMC was surveyed in 2005 and has earned Joint Commission accreditation through 2008.

Jackson Organization

The Jackson Organization is an independent research organization with widely recognized credentials among healthcare organizations across the country. The Jackson Organization conducts follow-up surveys among patients after they have received care here at AAMC, whether as inpatient or outpatient. The results of these surveys are converted to patient satisfaction scores, and these scores are then used as comparisons in national percentile rankings for hospitals.

AAMC routinely scores at or near the top of these national percentile rankings in most or all of the categories measured. The consistently high patient satisfaction scores recently earned AAMC the Jackson Organization’s number one inpatient ranking, nationwide, for patient satisfaction.

Maryland Hospital Association

The Maryland Hospital Association collects data from Maryland hospitals and then uses the data to make comparisons of how hospitals perform in a variety of quality and patient safety categories. Called the Maryland Hospital Performance Guide, the report lists how a hospital performs in each category, expressed as a percentage, what the average percentage is statewide, and the highest percentage attained in Maryland. AAMC’s percentages compare favorably to state averages in most categories.