Medline Signs Agreement With the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare

Medline Industries, Inc. announces that it has signed an agreement with the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare to contribute financially to the Center's Endowment Fund. The Center for Transforming Healthcare was developed to help solve healthcare's most critical safety and quality problems.

In this effort, Medline is joining other leading healthcare organizations in their commitment to eliminate preventable complications and transform healthcare.

"Medline is proud to support and share in the mission of solving healthcare's most critical safety and quality problems," says Andy Mills, president of Medline. "Medline's approach is to 'Make it hard for the healthcare worker to do the wrong thing.' We've studied some of the most pressing issues facing providers and have brought teams of experts together to design and test practical solutions to healthcare's everyday challenges."

Medline will take an active role to help achieve the Center's objectives, which include improving the quality and safety of healthcare through the application of robust process improvement methods, such as Lean Six Sigma and change management, and developing teams for patient care improvement initiatives in hospitals and other organizations. These initiatives specifically include: identifying common causes and solutions to patient safety and healthcare quality issues which can be applied to other healthcare organizations, eliminating defects in care processes that represent quality and safety risks with a potential to harm patients, and promoting high quality care to give patients the optimum benefits medical science has to offer.

Through its "Prevention Above All" initiative, Medline has developed comprehensive solutions to reducing hospital-acquired conditions (HACs). These programs, which target catheter-associated urinary tract infections, pressure ulcers and reducing hospital-acquired infections through hand hygiene compliance, achieve the dual goals of improved outcomes and cost savings.

Established in 2009, the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare aims to solve healthcare's most critical safety and quality problems. The Center's participants -- the nation's leading hospitals and health systems -- use a systematic approach to analyze specific breakdowns in care and discover their underlying causes to develop targeted solutions that solve these complex problems. In keeping with its objective to transform healthcare into a high reliability industry, The Joint Commission will share these proven effective solutions with the more than 18,000 healthcare organizations it accredits and certifies.

The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare addresses critical safety and quality problems, such as healthcare-associated infection, hand-off communications, wrong site surgery and surgical site infection. Although there is considerable agreement on the importance of these problems and on some strategies to address them, there is an even stronger demand for specific guidance on how to solve them. Healthcare organizations want highly effective, durable solutions that are ready to implement. The Center for Transforming Healthcare presents a new approach to achieve the magnitude and breadth of improvement that is sought by The Joint Commission, by healthcare organizations, by patients and their families, by physicians and other clinicians, and by other public and private stakeholders.

The Targeted Solutions Tool (TST), which encapsulates the work of the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare, provides a step-by-step process to measure performance, identify barriers to excellent performance and implement proven solutions.

The first set of targeted solutions, created by eight of the country's leading hospitals and healthcare systems that worked with the Center, is for improving hand hygiene. The TST provides accredited hospitals the foundation and framework of an improvement method that, if implemented well, will improve an organization's hand hygiene compliance and contribute substantially to its efforts to reduce the frequency of healthcare-associated infections. The data-driven tool provides validated and customized solutions to address an organization's particular barriers to excellent performance. Self-paced and confidential, the TST offers instantaneous data analysis to Joint Commission accredited organizations.

Medline Industries, Inc. manufactures and distributes more than 100,000 products to hospitals, extended-care facilities, surgery centers, home care dealers and agencies.