NIAHO^SM is a healthcare standard that improves quality and business integration, builds sustainable performance, improves effectiveness and has a proven success. And you're still not convinced?

1. Quality

Preventable medical errors continue to cause injury and even death. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement estimates that nearly 15 million instances of medical harm occur in the U.S. annually. That makes going to the hospital more dangerous than skydiving.* For the most part, "quality initiatives" describe noble safety and outcome goals but don't provide the tools for systemic change. It's time to match the skill and dedication of our health professionals with new "technology" that can change the system at its core.

* Accident rate and risk-of-death data collected from the U.S. Parachute Association and an independent study by HealthGrades, respectively, show that a person going to the hospital has a .75% chance of dying from an "error" and a person has a .10% chance of dying from skydiving.

2. Integration

Current accreditation programs have little impact on the business practices that are responsible for creating quality and controlling costs. With a national healthcare bill of over $2 trillion, we literally cannot afford a hospital "inspection" regime that does not integrate with core business process, and yet requires so much time and effort from our healthcare providers.

3. Sustainability

Conventional accreditation models create a "survival" instead of an "improvement" mentality for many healthcare organizations making it virtually impossible to see, let alone implement, best practices. Quality driven organizations know that lasting improvements result from objective, sustained learning and standardized adoption of better ideas.

4. Effectiveness

Innovation is sorely needed in the very process by which accreditation surveys are conducted. To begin with, conducting surveys every three years creates a yo-yo-dieting effect, draining time and resources from staff to prepare for the survey only to start all over again when the cycle repeats itself. An integrated accreditation process – one that blends practices for continual improvement with Medicare standards – should occur annually and become transparently ingrained in the daily work flow of clinicians, support staff and managerial teams across the entire organisation.

5. Proven success

The status quo in hospital accreditation has not fundamentally changed in over 40 years. In that time, other industries have enjoyed sweeping revolutions in continual quality improvement. Our own industry witnesses almost daily innovations in the technology of medicine and disease prevention and it’s time for our accreditation process to catch up with our progress in other areas.