All 6 UR Medicine Hospitals Have Earned Joint Commission Gold Seal of Approval®

All six UR Medicine hospitals have earned The Joint Commission’s Gold Seal of Approval® for Hospital Accreditation by demonstrating continuous compliance with its performance standards. The Gold Seal is a symbol of quality that reflects a health care organization’s commitment to providing safe and quality patient care.

This is the first time multiple UR Medicine facilities were examined as part of the same survey, as one system, a request made by the University of Rochester Medical Center to The Joint Commission to better compare quality and safety across its Upstate New York health care network. UR Medicine includes Strong Memorial, Highland, F.F. Thompson, Noyes Memorial, St. James, and Jones Memorial hospitals (see table below). All participated but St. James, which was surveyed in 2018. It will join the system survey process in 2022.

The Joint Commission standards focus on patient safety and quality of care, with more than 250 criteria that address such things as patient rights and education, infection control, medication management, provider verification, and the condition of the facility. The organization is the nation’s oldest and largest standards-setting and accrediting body in health care.

“The Joint Commission’s process involves in-person, onsite inspections at each facility, with extensive examination of hundreds of measures that assess our safety and quality,” said Robert J. Panzer, M.D., chief quality officer of URMC and Strong Memorial Hospital. “That rigorous process provides us with an independent evaluation that is respected across the health care industry.”

Requesting that all UR Medicine hospitals be evaluated on the same schedule afforded an opportunity to see, through the lens of Joint Commission standards, how our hospitals compare to one another and how working together has improved safety and quality, said Bilal Ahmed, M.D., chief medical officer for Noyes and St. James and associate medical director for Highland.

Affiliations over the past five years – Noyes and Jones in 2015, and most recently St. James in 2018 – have resulted in all six UR Medicine affiliates being able to further improve quality and patient safety by sharing and employing best practices, such as approaches to high-level disinfection for infection prevention, while providing their communities a wider range of services that in the past smaller hospitals could not accomplish alone.