Unlike competitive bidding, accreditation is not going away. Accreditation is synonomous with quality and everyone is in favor of quality.
So you will have to get accredited but it does not have to be a burden. Done correctly accreditation can make your business operate more efficiently, increase staff morale, raise your image within your community, and make you more money.
That sounds like a tall order but in my seven years of helping healthcare facilities get accredited, 90% have reported these improvements after going through the accreditation process. There are always 10% who don’t get the message, but we will assume that you are not in that group.
How does this work? Good business processes need to be embedded in your organization through written policies and procedures. This is the core of the accreditation process. Employees need to know these, follow them in their daily duties, and know where to find them when they have questions.
Quality improvement is an essentil element of accreditation. As you are working on QI you will acquire data which will tell you the level of quality you have achieved. This can be used to tell payers, patients, and providers that you are a high quality organization.
By networking with other accredited DME companies it is possible to get private payers to admit you to their networks. This quality network can also bring new revenues to you from referring physicians and hospitals.
My next blog will talk about why you should get accredited by the biggest, oldest, and best recognized accrediting body, The Joint Commission or JCAHO.
Tags: DME Acc, JCAHO Accreditation, Profitable Accreditation
July 18, 2008 at 9:01 pm |
Accreditation is very important. And I agree with you that it is not an effective goal in and of itself. Many American health systems are significantly underinvested in quality management Infrastructure, Process, and Organization. To often hospitals “cram” to get a passing grade on the triennial Survey, rather than strive to to develop a “world class” quality management foundation that includes:
Strategy: including a clear linkage of quality and patient safety to the organizational strategy and a Board-driven imperative to achieve quality goals.
Infrastructure: incorporating effective quality management technology, EMR and physician order entry, evidence based care development tools and methodologies, and quality performance metrics and monitoring technology that enables “real time” information.
Process: including concurrent intervention, the ability to identify key quality performance “gaps,” and performance improvement tools and methodologies to effectively eliminate quality issues.
Organization: providing sufficient number and quality of human resources to deliver quality planning and management leadership, adequate informatics management, effective evidence based care and physician order set development, performance improvement activity, and accredition planning to stay “survey ready every day.”
Culture: where a passion for quality and patient safety is embedded throughout the delivery system and leaders are incented to achieve aggressive quality improvement goals.
My firm has assisted a number of progressive health systems to achieve such a foundation, and to develop truly World Class Quality.
August 12, 2008 at 8:30 pm |
The challenge for us in the DME market is taking small, understaffed, unwilling, cash poor companies and getting them started down the path to quality.
We still get complaints about charging them $2300 to lead them to a successful survey.
This what makes the web approach so important. By delivering the content and the consultant over the Internet we reduce their costs and make our consultants more productive. It also lets us tap into a pool of workers who want part time work from home.