As president of The Joint Commission, Mark Chassin, MD, oversees the activities of the nation's predominant accrediting body in healthcare and affects quality standards for surgery centers and hospitals across the country. He also serves as president of the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare, which, under his leadership, has worked to address hand-off communications, wrong site surgery, healthcare-associated infections and medication errors.
Dr. Chassin previously served as the Edmond A. Guggenheim Professor of Health Policy and founding chairman of the department of health policy at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. At Mount Sinai, Dr. Chassin built a nationally acclaimed quality improvement program that focused on making improvements in quality of care, safety, clinical outcomes, patient experience and work environment. He also focused on developing healthcare quality measures and understanding how quality measurement and improvement relates to healthcare policy.
In a 2007 interview for The Joint Commission newsletter, Dr. Chassin discussed upcoming innovations in the field of quality measures. "We should be able to provide organizations with generalizable lessons so that they save time and resources from developing tools on their own and move more rapidly toward improvement," he said. "For example, if you want to reduce the frequency of long delays in getting laboratory tests back to clinicians, what specific causes of that problem have other hospitals, similar to yours, found when they tackled the problem? How exactly did they successfully manage the underlying causes of the problem?"
He added that healthcare facilities should not be satisfied with simply achieving accreditation; instead, they should strive every day to uphold high standards of quality. "Accreditation is vital to improvement, but it is not sufficient by itself," he said. "I would like to go beyond measurement and accreditation to facilitate that kind of improvement in quality and safety in accredited organizations."
Dr. Chassin has also done work on reducing racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare. He has been recognized for contributing to the fields of quality improvement with several honors and is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a lifetime member of the National Associates of the National Academies.
Dr. Chassin received his MD from Harvard University and a master's degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He also holds a master's degree in public health from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Read more on notable hospital leaders:
-Hospital Leader to Know: Richard Umbdenstock of the AHA
-Hospital Leader to Know: Jeff Brickman of Provena Medical Center
Dr. Chassin previously served as the Edmond A. Guggenheim Professor of Health Policy and founding chairman of the department of health policy at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. At Mount Sinai, Dr. Chassin built a nationally acclaimed quality improvement program that focused on making improvements in quality of care, safety, clinical outcomes, patient experience and work environment. He also focused on developing healthcare quality measures and understanding how quality measurement and improvement relates to healthcare policy.
In a 2007 interview for The Joint Commission newsletter, Dr. Chassin discussed upcoming innovations in the field of quality measures. "We should be able to provide organizations with generalizable lessons so that they save time and resources from developing tools on their own and move more rapidly toward improvement," he said. "For example, if you want to reduce the frequency of long delays in getting laboratory tests back to clinicians, what specific causes of that problem have other hospitals, similar to yours, found when they tackled the problem? How exactly did they successfully manage the underlying causes of the problem?"
He added that healthcare facilities should not be satisfied with simply achieving accreditation; instead, they should strive every day to uphold high standards of quality. "Accreditation is vital to improvement, but it is not sufficient by itself," he said. "I would like to go beyond measurement and accreditation to facilitate that kind of improvement in quality and safety in accredited organizations."
Dr. Chassin has also done work on reducing racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare. He has been recognized for contributing to the fields of quality improvement with several honors and is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a lifetime member of the National Associates of the National Academies.
Dr. Chassin received his MD from Harvard University and a master's degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He also holds a master's degree in public health from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Read more on notable hospital leaders:
-Hospital Leader to Know: Richard Umbdenstock of the AHA
-Hospital Leader to Know: Jeff Brickman of Provena Medical Center