Joint Commission (JC) announced on June 30, 2025, that it is making significant updates to its standards used by hospitals and critical access hospitals to guide compliance with JC accreditation requirements and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Conditions of Participation.
The change, which consolidates and rewrites JC’s Life Safety and Environment of Care standards to improve alignment with the Conditions of Participation, will require careful review by health care facilities managers working to remain compliant with JC accreditation requirements.
ASHE is committed to supporting health care facilities professionals as they implement this change and is updating several resources and education courses to help the field understand and reference the updated JC standards. Read below for a summary of the JC standard modifications, the impact on the field, and what ASHE tools and resources are available to help facilities professionals through this change.
Key Changes in Structure: The accreditation restructuring, titled “Accreditation 360: The New Standard,” includes a complete overhaul of the standards numbering system and elements of performance, making prior versions of the standards vastly different from the newly published standards.
For example, one of the most notable changes for facilities managers is the restructuring of the Environment of Care (EC) and Life Safety (LS) chapters into a single, unified chapter titled “Physical Environment.” Additionally, the total number of standards and elements of performance have been significantly reduced, simplifying compliance requirements. Previously, the EC and LS chapters contained 44 standards with 396 elements of performance. Under the new JC structure, these have been consolidated and the number of elements of performance have been reduced by 46% for critical access hospitals and 48% for hospitals.
In total, JC said it is removing 714 requirements from the hospital accreditation program. And in a move towards greater transparency, starting in July, Joint Commission standards will be available online and will be searchable by the public.
Full details on the standards update are available on Joint Commission’s website here, including accreditation requirements, crosswalks, survey process guides, disposition reports and more.
What This Means for Compliance: At first glance, it may seem that JC has reduced compliance requirements. However, these requirements have been consolidated, not eliminated, into broader standard categories, ensuring greater alignment with CMS’ Conditions of Participation as well as K-Tags and A-Tags from CMS’s Survey Operations Manual.
While the standard numbers and organization are changing, the core substance of the standards remains largely intact. JC has been approved as a national accrediting organization by CMS and must ensure that its accreditation standards are in alignment with the Conditions of Participation, which incorporate the NFPA 99, Health Care Facilities Code, and NFPA 101®, Life Safety Code®, along with additional referenced codes.
The updated standards will take effect on January 1, 2026, though JC has noted that it understands there will be a learning curve in the field and that they will not cite hospitals for references to the old standards as long as the requirement is still being met. ASHE advises that health care organizations take steps now to ensure they are prepared for the revised structure if participating in JC’s accreditation program.
