Tackle your spreadsheet PFIs before September 1

Safety managers may need to take low-tech steps to meet the deadline

The Joint Commission requires plans for improvement (PFI) to be filed electronically on a hospital's extranet connection with the accreditor. More than likely, your hospital files new PFIs this way.

Originally, ongoing PFIs from 2006 and before also were to be entered electronically. But converting to The Joint Commission's system proved to require labor-intensive data entry for hospitals with older PFIs marooned in databases, in Excel spreadsheets, or on paper.

The commission has long promised a conversion tool to help hospitals covert their older PFIs, and with that goal still in mind the accreditor has extended the filing deadline to September 1 to import PFIs into the electronic Statement of Conditions (SOC).

Get on top of your paper-based PFIs

Many databases that hospitals might use for PFIs will convert their output to Excel, which The Joint Commission's upcoming tool will recognize. However, The Joint Commission already has indicated that its program will not recognize scanned paper files or PDFs.

The tool "is anticipated to be available in the third quarter of 2007," according to a March 23 Joint Commission announcement posted on its Web site. That wording leaves open the possibility of the tool not being ready by September 1.

"It will be interesting if they keep that deadline; they've already pushed it back twice," says Thomas Huser, safety coordinator for Clarian Health in Indianapolis.

"Initially it was January 1, then it was July 1. Now it's September 1, because [Joint Commission officials] understand there's all this information out there, and it's not click-click-click and it's done," he says.