Healthcare Accreditation Organizations in the United States Five of the most respected accreditation organizations in the healthcare industry include: The Joint Commission (JCAHO) The National...

UNITED STATES: HEALTHCARE ACCREDIATION 1
Review
Of
Healthcare Accreditation Organizations in the United States
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Abstract
This paper presents the review of top five organizations in the Unites States of America that
perform accreditation as well as fosters establishment of standards for the healthcare delivery.
The agencies that will be reviewed in this paper are The Joint Commission (JCAHO); The
National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA); The Utilization Review Accreditation
Commission (URAC); The Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF);
and The Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC). All the above
accreditation organizations are unique in context of their objectives, mission, organizational
history and history, accreditation programs, and accreditation standards. As it is true fact that the
accreditation process is said to be desirable process for establishing standards and working
towards achieving high performance and quality in health care services. This paper will review
the degree to which these organizations are able to achieve higher health quality services and
also provide recommendation for gaining better quality health care services across United States.
Keywords: Healthcare accreditation, JCAHO, NCQA, URAC, CARF, AAAHC.
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Review of Healthcare Accreditation Organizations in the United States
Accreditation of the healthcare service providers are practiced in many parts of the work
and now a days it is growing exponentially and has positive result in compliance of the published
standards as well as help in improving the organizational processes. But at the same time, there is
scarce data on its effectiveness in terms of clinical process as well as outcomes. Therefore, the
following section will first review structure and services provided by the above mention
accreditation organization and then recommendation will be made to minimize the gap between
exiting and required quality in the healthcare.
The Joint Commission (JCAHO)
The Joint commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JACHO) is the
name of organization that is cu
ently known as The Joint commission. The organizational
structure of JCAHO is basically a non-for-profit organization that was formed in 1917 and
headquartered at Oak
ook Te
ace, United States. The organization is formed with the objective
of dedicating there services for providing high value services to the healthcare organization. So,
this organization has accredited more than 19000 healthcare organizations as well as programs in
Unites States of America.
In addition to this, JACHO was formed with the mission to continuously improve the
health care of public along with the collaboration of the other stakeholders; through evaluating
various healthcare organizations as well as inspiring them for performing extremely well in
fostering effective and safe healthcare of high value and quality. This is the reason why JCAHO
is the organization that has collaborated with the health care organizations for more than half
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century in order to provide safe and quality care to the American people through the voluntary
independent process of evaluation. The health care is the only industry that it serves. Further, the
vision statement of JCAHO states that all people should always get safest, best-value, and
highest quality health care services across all the settings (Joint-commission, 2012).
The following are the various types of accreditation that the organization provides, like:
1) accreditation for the hospitals that is in compliance with all the applicable standards during the
process of survey or which has successfully addressed all the specifications for the purpose of
improvements. 2) Provisional to the hospitals who has failed to successfully address all the
specifications for the improvement within specified timeframe. 3) Conditional where the
equirement for the improvement is dependent upon further onsite follow-up inspection or
survey. 4) Preliminary denial on the basis of severity of the findings that justifies denial of the
accreditation and where the decision is based on further review as well as appeal. 5) Denial
where the accreditation has been removed as well as appeals has been exhausted.
There are several reports available on the JCAHO’s websites related to the providing
quality information and one of the primary reports is the report that is prepared by JCAHO on
each of the hospitals that it surveys. In addition to this, it communicates report related to
accredited hospitals, laboratories, assisted living laboratories, and various other health care
services and facilities...