Considering Accreditation

“Give me more paperwork, increased document management requirements, more fees and expenses.” For some, this statement is synonymous with “We should be accredited.” This attitude has been supported by owners, managers and bean-counters who try to make businesses operate faster, easier and cheaper. It is, however, a myopic view.

When my firm is engaged to guide profit improvement, we generally focus on cost reductions since we can't increase prices. Although the additional activities and expenses related to accreditation may seem opposed to cost reductions, some of the practices that we have recommended to non-accredited providers are promoted by the accreditation process.

In other words, implementation of quality management systems that support accreditation also support profit improvement and, thereby, provide economic value.

• The Obvious

  Some providers have pursued accreditation because it brings a related opportunity to increase or maintain sales volume. Now, with the Medicare Modernization Act, it will be a requirement to maintain sales volume, so “no accreditation” may equate to “no value.”

• Examination

  Providers often get caught up in building the business and fail to build systems with efficient processes. Systems evolve, are rarely efficient and almost never integrated with other systems. The result is inefficiencies brought on by multiple ways to accomplish the same process, redundancies set up by departments that don't consider what is done elsewhere in the company and waste brought on by backtracking to perform the forgotten step(s).

  In preparing for an accreditation survey, for example, one company realized it was writing the same information on four different forms. One person would complete a form and pass it on to the next person, and so on. By redesigning forms and databases, the company eliminated this time- and money-waster. Accreditation caused the self-examination.

• Systemization

  The first advantage of systemization is repetition. When we repeatedly perform a well-designed process, we learn to perform it more quickly. Saving time is saving money.

  Second, when we perform a well-designed process, we are less prone to mistakes. Of course this is one of the tenets of quality. Systemization helps us get it right so we don't have to undo and redo. There is obvious economic value here.