CHAPTER 11
Urgent Care Accreditation
Michael Kulczycki, Laurel Stoimenoff, and John Shufeldt
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EVERY URGENT CARE FACILITY operator will eventually confront the question of whether to get the facility accredited. Accreditation is a process that tells the stakeholders in your business (your patients, your community, your liability insurance company, your staff) that your facility adheres to a certain set of quality standards. These standards are meant to improve patient care and reduce the number of mistakes that can often plague hectic and information-heavy environments like urgent care and other health-care facilities.
For urgent care clinics, accreditation is generally not necessary to have a legally compliant operation, and most managed-care organizations don’t require accreditation at this time. Nonetheless, being able to show that your facility adheres to certain standards can help with receiving managed-care reimbursements, lowering your liability insurance expenses, and improving your operations.
Accreditation of medical facilities in the United States can be traced back to the Joint Commission, which was formed in 1951 as the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals. The Joint Commission is a nonprofit organization that creates best practices guidelines for hospitals and medical facilities to ensure high-quality patient care. Although the Joint Commission’s original focus was on hospitals, in the mid-1970s the organization began to offer accreditation options that targeted other types of facilities.
However, the Joint Commission is not the only body that can provide accreditation. The Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC) was founded in 1979 and has played an instrumental role in developing best practices policies and providing accreditation, but it does not specialize in urgent care centers.
Another organization, the American Academy of Urgent Care Medicine (AAUCM), developed an accreditation system in 2000 to focus on the needs of urgent care clinics. This was largely because the earlier accreditation requirements, such as those from the Joint Commission, were deemed too broad for the needs of urgent care clinics. Most recently, the Urgent Care Association of America (UCAOA) announced that it was planning to establish its own accreditation program that would combine the Joint Commission’s practices with the UCAOA’s existing Certified Urgent Care Center guidelines.
Together, these four agencies (Joint Commission, AAAHC, AAUCM, and UCAOA) are likely to continue playing a dominant part in the accreditation of urgent care clinics. Although the Joint Commission and AAAHC are older organizations that have built a reputation for accrediting medical institutions, the AAUCM and UCAOA offer an approach that focuses on the operational dynamics of urgent care clinics. This narrower approach will likely provide more educational and operational value to urgent care facility operators.