DNV accreditation gains ground
HCPro’s MSP Salary Survey asks respondents to name the entities that accredit their organization. Since 2012, the percentage of respondents who have selected DNV has doubled, from 4% of respondents to 8% in 2015. DNV entered the accreditation fray in 2008, when it was granted deeming status by CMS. Currently, it accredits nearly 500 healthcare organizations in the U.S., and that number is growing.
The percentage of respondents who cite The Joint Commission as an accreditor has also risen during that time, and that accreditor holds a wide lead among survey respondents. (The survey permits respondents to give multiple answers to this question.) Therefore, the jump in DNV responses is probably not solely a result of respondents switching over from the nation’s largest accreditor.
However, some facilities are signing on with DNV after leaving The Joint Commission. CRCJ recently spoke with people in several facilities that made the switch. They report that there are some similarities as well as marked differences between these accreditors.
New facility, new organization
One relatively early DNV convert was Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, a 482-bed nonprofit hospital in Newport Beach, California. In late 2009, the organization was getting ready to open a second campus in Irvine, and decided to explore a shift from Joint Commission accreditation to DNV.
The main drivers of the change were physicians who would be working in a separately licensed orthopedic specialty hospital that was in the same building in Irvine, says Marilyn Lang, RN, JD, director of safety and regulatory compliance at Hoag, in Newport Beach. The orthopedic specialty hospital had partial physician ownership, and as they made plans for their facility, some of the physicians in the orthopedic institute requested Hoag look into DNV as an alternative to The Joint Commission. At that point, DNV had held deemed status for only a year, and many at Hoag hadn’t heard of it.
Lang contacted DNV-accredited hospitals and talked to them about the processes. In addition, Hoag did a side-by-side comparison of DNV and Joint Commission accreditation. “We tried to be really objective with every aspect of the two accrediting agencies. We took that to [organization leadership] and the board.”
After that, things happened quickly: In December 2009, the board gave its okay to go with DNV. “They were quite enthusiastic,” Lang says, “but as the accreditation director, I was nervous because I didn’t know that much about DNV.”