Accreditation and Certification: Do They Improve Hospital Financial and Quality Performance?

Abstract

The relationship between healthcare organizational accreditation and their leaders’ professional certification in healthcare management is of specific interest to institutions of higher education and individuals in the healthcare management field. Since academic program accreditation is one piece of evidence of high-quality education, and since professional certification is an attestation to the knowledge, skills, and abilities of those who are certified, we expect alumni who graduated from accredited programs and obtained professional certification to have a positive impact on the organizations that they lead, compared with alumni who did not graduate from accredited programs and who did not obtain professional certification. The authors’ analysis examined the impact of hiring graduates from higher education programs that held external accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education (CAHME). Graduates’ affiliation with the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) professional healthcare leadership organization was also assessed as an independent variable. Study outcomes focused on these graduates’ respective healthcare organization’s performance measures (cost, quality, and access) to assess the researchers’ inquiry into the perceived value of a CAHME-accredited graduate degree in healthcare administration and a professional ACHE affiliation. The results from this study found no effect of CAHME accreditation or ACHE affiliation on healthcare organization performance outcomes. The study findings support the need for future research surrounding healthcare administration professional graduate degree program characteristics and leader development affiliations, as perceived by various industry stakeholders.

The implementation of a caring safety model to decrease adverse events

“…In developing countries, various risk factors have been identified that can lead to AEs; they include inadequate health infrastructure and facilities, limited medicines, minimal effort to prevent and control nosocomial infections, low competency, and poor officer performance due to insufficient remuneration, reward systems, lack of education, and training [23]. In addition, the failure of the credential system also affects individual and hospital performances [24]. On the one hand, for whatever reason, patients should not become victims of the weaknesses of the existing management system.…”