Dnv Accreditation Dnv Hospital Accreditation

DNV Accreditation

DNV Hospital Accreditation

When patients go or are brought to a hospital, it is with a certain implicit trust that the hospital's standards and practices are adequate to provide them the care that their health and often their very lives depend on. Though most hospitals are run in order to earn a profit, these institutions provide an essential public service and are therefore held to higher and more stringent standards than other private corporations. Consumers of healthcare do not have the same recourse in simply choosing to spend their dollars elsewhere if dissatisfied with a particular company's product or service. This means that there must be a substantial measure of trust and security in the value of the service and product provided by hospitals prior to any group or individual's experience with the hospital's care.

The provision of this trust and security is accomplished via the process of accreditation, whereby certain companies or organizations -- who have themselves been vetted and certified as capable of carrying out the task -- examine the facilities, standards, and procedures of a hospital and determine whether or not they are sufficient to provide the expected level of care. For more than thirty years, the only two bodies in the United States that had the authority to grant accreditation to hospitals were the Joint

Commission and the American Osteopathic Association's Healthcare Facilities

Accreditation Program, but this changed in 2008 when the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) approved the Norwegian-based Det Norske Veritas (DNV) (Dow 2009; Curran 2-010). This move could potentially bring a major change to hospital accreditation in general.

The Changes and Impact of DNV Accreditation

There are several important changes brought to the hospital accreditation system in the United States by the approval of DNV as an accrediting agency. This is not just because the organization increases the competition for accreditation agencies, which at only two for over three decades was slim to none, though this is an important aspect of the new situation presented by DNV's entrance into hospital accreditation (Curran 2010). DNV's accreditation program, due to substantial differences from the accreditation programs utilized by the Joint Commission and the American Osteopathic Association's Healthcare Facilities Accreditation Program, will change the competitive nature of hospitals themselves (Dow 2009). As the company's accreditation program spreads, these effects are likely to be magnified.

Healthcare is already a very competitive field, and there are a multitude of ranking systems and schemes that hospitals are always trying to improve their scores on, in order to earn better reputations than their competitors. The entrance of DNV into the accreditation business (in some perspectives, it is DNV's entrance that makes hospital accreditation a business) provides one more avenue for hospitals to attempt to distinguish themselves and their level of service and care provided from that of their neighbors. The DNV maintains stricter standards of evaluation than are required by law in order to earn its accreditation, and conducts annual surveys and reviews of all of its accredited institutions -- a feature which is neither required nor supplied by the other two accreditation agencies (Dow 2009). Hospitals are already switching to DNV accreditation as a mark of distinction.