Design Your National Quality Health Care Program Around Your Resources: Health Care Assessment System Solutions
Building on more than 55 years of healthcare accreditation experience, AC offers a variety of local solutions to Healthcare Regulators and Accreditation Bodies that wish to improve their existing assessment programs or create new ones. Organizations that wish to develop, review or update their standards, automate a program, develop surveyor competencies or simply exchange ideas and resources, find great comfort to work with our Healthcare Assessment System solutions.
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Assessing Your Needs
AC’s internationally recognized experts collect and analyze data related to the needs of your health care system. Experts conduct onsite and offsite work through structured interviews, documentation review, and focus groups. This assessment leads to a detailed report and recommendations on the development and review of diverse components of health care quality improvement, patient safety and accreditation measures.
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Planning and Design
Our experts support strategic planning with key stakeholders to identify the direction to adopt with regards to health care improvement, patient safety and accreditation. Once the project objectives are determined, strategies can be established leading to identifying resources, roles and responsibilities, and project timelines.
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Standards, Resources and Software
AC can support you in updating your current standards and developing or licensing new standards for your program. We ensure that health care organizations undergoing local accreditation program have appropriate tools to facilitate implementation of the program. AC has developed a unique expertise in the automation of diverse accreditation programs through web and mobile platforms to make the accreditation process efficient and accurate. Ready-to-use software is available for the Qmentum Licensed Program or client-owned programs.
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Local Requirements
AC is at the forefront of innovation in the field of accreditation. It has a unique experience to interpret local requirements into licensing and/or accreditation standards. Our experts have a broad exposure to number of national and regional models that can benefit our clients.
Collaboration Centers can also integrate local guidelines and legislation into the Qmentum Licensed Program architecture.
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Organizational Development
AC prepares regulators and accreditation bodies’ leaders and staff to implement changes in their assessment system or introduce new programs. AC’s experts build confidence to manage a local program through various learning methodologies, including coaching, classroom training or online platforms. We can also assess skills and experience of existing teams or support recruitment of staff and onboarding.
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Surveyor Development
Competent and professional surveyors are at the core of an effective accreditation system. We work with you to review or create leading surveyor models, adapted to your specific health care environment. AC provides you with support to review and develop competency framework, processes for surveyor selection, recruitment, training, assignment and ongoing maintenance of surveyor pool, and many other aspects of surveyor management and deployment.
Accreditation Canada’s surveyor training model is accredited by ISQua and has been transferred to many accreditation bodies worldwide in the past 20 years. Our approach can be customized to existing standards and processes or delivered as is within the Qmentum Licensed Program. Survey methodologies have evolved over time in order to meet inter-reliability requirements and support health care organizations in their improvement journey. Our training programs cover key skills including criteria and guidelines interpretation, observation of health care operations, documentation review, interview skills, report writing and debriefing techniques.
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Educating Healthcare Organizations
AC’s Education Program offers a variety of courses (PDF) that can be made available to health care organizations. These training sessions enable personnel of your client healthcare organizations to gain essential knowledge of the accreditation program as well as support their quality improvement efforts. These courses can be offered by your organization or in collaboration with AC.
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Surveys and Co-Surveys
Regulators and accreditation bodies do not always have the number of surveyors or specific expertise to conduct their surveys. Many of them solicit AC to provide our surveyors’ time. This approach expedites the process and objectivity of survey results, especially for small health care systems. Regulators and accreditation bodies can contract AC to perform their surveys or include one or more surveyors as part of national survey teams.
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Accreditation Decisions Support
Often regulators and accreditation bodies rely on committees to render decisions. AC has significant experience with developing accreditation decision guidelines, reviewing survey results objectively, publishing decisions and managing appeals. Accreditation Canada’s Accreditation Decision Committee (ADC) can provide support to accreditation decision makers, as well as guide them in how to design decision guidelines to achieve a high level of quality and patient safety.
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Accreditation Support to Healthcare Organizations
Managing questions including queries on a broad range of standards and criteria posed by health care clients can be overwhelming. Accreditation Canada and AC work with thousands of health care facilities in the full continuum of care and understands their reality. Our seasoned health care improvement advisors can help local health care organizations implement health care quality and patient safety best practices through a no-nonsense approach.
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Updating Standards and Resources
Through its Program Development team, AC offers services to regularly update client-owned standards and resources. Collaboration Centers benefit from the regular updates performed on the Qmentum Licensed Program at a fraction of the cost of maintaining their own program. Accreditation Canada’s selected standards are updated every two years by international experts to guarantee they are aligned with the latest research and development, innovations and best practice around the world.
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Software Upgrades, Maintenance and Technical Support
Collaboration Centers using the Qmentum Licensed Program receive updates to the AccreditationAcceleration Suite software, AC’s flagship software to automate and manage the Qmentum Licensed Program. This software includes a health care organization management platform, surveyor deployment module, report editing and accreditation decision making modules, as well as self-assessment, internal audit tool and numerous built in questionnaire and instruments that can be sent and completed anonymously by individual health care organizations.
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Healthcare Assessment System Support
Although regulators and accreditation bodies may have launched their accreditation program, their partnership with ACI does not have to end here. Additional support related to managing their accreditation program, resources, or organizational processes may help to avoid problems Accreditation Canada faced in the past six decades. AC offers remote access to dozens of accreditation experts on various subjects such as governance, management, standards and surveyor development, etc.