Formerly Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO). Established in 1951 as Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH). It is a not-for-profit accrediting body for clinics, hospitals, and other federal and military facilities. The Joint Commission reviews the policies, patient records, credentialing procedures, and quality assurance programs of the facility. When the Joint Commission awards official approval, it means the quality and high standards of the facility have been met after their scrutiny. This is the goal of every facility that goes through the process about every 3 years.

Written agreement by a covered entity giving sanction to use the approval of another covered affiliated entity.

Type of credit life insurance that pays a full benefit amount to a lender on the death of any of the cosigners of a loan.

Type of life insurance agreement that gives coverage to two lives and provides for payment of the proceeds at the time of the first insured’s death.

1. Knowledge sufficient to understand the nature of a transaction. 2. Official and authentic decision of a court of justice on the respective rights of the parties to an action submitted to it for determination.

Pertaining to the action in a court of law.

In the Medicare program, after payment or denial of an insurance claim and four levels of appeal, this is the fifth level in which the provider may file a civil action to be heard in a U.S. District Court. The amount in controversy must be $1000 or more.

1. Date in the Julian calendar, or actual number of the day within the year (i.e., July 17, 2006, is Julian date 2453934.1471). Astronomers and calendricists use the term in this sense, according to which a Julian date is a number, denoting a point in time, which consists of an integer part and a fractional part (e.g., 2439291.301), where the integer part is a Julian day number and the fractional part specifies the time elapsed since the start of the day denoted by that Julian day number. 2. In the commercial world the term “Julian date” has been used for a quite different concept, that of the number of the chronological date of the year 001 through 365 preceded by a two-digit year designation, so that January 1st = day 001 and February 28th = day 059; thus 06121 would be Monday, May 1, 2006. For the number of the day in the year, the proper term for this concept is “ordinal date.”