How to Achieve Accreditation Readiness

The accreditation process can be a lot of work, but in the end can be incredibly beneficial for your brand as it gives it credibility. Ultimately, it signals to potential patients and employees that your organization is a reputable place to go. Beyond this, accreditation ensures employees are competent with necessary skills and are acting compliantly. That being said, getting the thumbs up from accrediting bodies can sometimes be a nightmare if you’re not prepared for the surveys. Here are some tips on how your organization can achieve accreditation readiness.

1. Form a team

Form a system-wide team that can support the vision, making sure all necessary departments are represented. This team will oversee the governance of policy and procedure creation and approval.

2. Modernize your approach

Forget about wasting time pushing paper or having documents get lost in emails. Invest in software that can help with:

Centralize policies and procedures
Automate review cycle tracking
Automate approval process
Standardize policy creation workflow and dissemination
Offer transparency with sister facilities
Offer a way to regulate permissions so that only system level policies are accessible

3. Standardize policy and procedure creation

Create a system-wide standardized method for creating policies and procedures. This includes a template on how a policy or procedure should be written, as well as the steps required for approval, dissemination, and where to store it.

With these key factors in place, you’ll be able to ensure that your policies and procedures are:

Always up-to-date – so employees always have the most current information
Always relevant – to ensure employees have access to the information they need and do not have access to the policies that they don’t need.
Always available – making policies and procedures accessible and easy to find at point of care.

While accreditation is voluntary, it is a requirement for medicare and medicaid funding, but is also viewed as essential for hospitals. After all, when a hospital meets national health, quality and safety standards they can be assured that their patients will receive the best care.

To learn more about how you can be survey ready, read our case study on Larkin Community Hospital and how they streamlined their on-site survey process.

About the author

Oi Lee

Oi started her career writing ads, but eventually found her way to marketing. Having worked in the healthcare software industry for over 3 years, she's passionate about bringing great stories that matter to her audience. In her free time, you'll find her watching panda videos.