The Joint Commission has unveiled a tool hospitals can use to prevent incidences of wrong-site surgery. Developed by the Center for Transforming Healthcare, the Joint Commission's quality-improvement arm, the tool joins another one already available to providers for improving hand-hygiene compliance.

The Targeted Solutions Tool has several applications that allow hospitals to identify safety risks in their own organizations, determine root causes and develop specialized strategies to address them, the Joint Commission said.

“Reducing the risk of wrong-site, wrong-procedure and wrong-patient surgery is critical to patient safety and the reputation of any healthcare organization that performs invasive procedures” said Dr. Mark Chassin, president of the Joint Commission, in a news release. “The Targeted Solutions Tool offers organizations a straightforward approach to identifying and eliminating risks of wrong-site surgery in all phases of the process of surgery, from scheduling to the operating room.”

Working with hospitals and surgery centers, the center identified 29 potential causes of wrong-site surgery. Participating pilot sites that used the tool reduced their “number of surgical cases with risks” by 51% in the operating room and by 46% in scheduling, according to the release.

The Targeted Solutions Tool is available to all Joint Commission-accredited hospitals. The next set of solutions, which will address hand-off communications, are expected to be available by this summer, the organization said.