Nearly 200 AAMI members have already joined the Joint Commission Discussion Group, a new online benefit of AAMI membership. This new online community is devoted exclusively to Joint Commission-related issues, questions, and challenges, through which all AAMI members can share their own Joint Commission experiences, ask questions, learn from others, obtain resources, and expand the knowledge base of the field.

The new resource is the latest initiative undertaken by AAMI's Technology Management Council (TMC) to increase the access to, and information about, Joint Commission issues.

This e-forum is the first of several online communities that AAMI will launch over the next year to expand the networking and educational opportunities of all AAMI members.
This Joint Commission e-forum, which operates like a listserv, enables AAMI members to post questions about various Joint Commission-related topics; and receive e-mail responses instantaneously, in digest form, or e-mail messages.

In addition, the e-forum contains more than 60 important guidance documents and resources, including breaking news from the Joint Commission, Joint Commission-related articles previously published in AAMI's journal, BI&T; and a valuable archive of Joint Commission documents. Topics range from sentinel events and surveyors to tubing misconnections and clinical alarms.

This new e-forum,which replaces a Joint Commission "e-community" that AAMI had launched last year, is more user-friendly and enables AAMI to offer more benefits through the online community as a result.

Since its inception in 2004, the TMC has been committed to providing AAMI members with greater access to The Joint Commission. For example, the TMC helped launch a new column in BI&T, called Joint Commission News & Views, which has included articles about Joint Commission patient safety goals, secrets of a successful survey, and experiences with the Joint Commission's "tracer" methodology.

The TMC has also sponsored Q&A sessions at AAMI's last two Annual Conferences featuring George Mills, senior engineer in The Joint Commission's Standards Interpretation Group. Mills will return to the AAMI Annual Conference this year to speak. The AAMI Annual Conference will be held in San Jose from May 31 to June 2.

Watch AAMI News and AAMI News Extra! for additional details on the other new online communities. For more information about the TMC, visit www.aami.org/tmc.