How to simplify AAAHC accreditation

Why should ambulatory healthcare centers seek AAAHC accreditation?

For starters, it provides access to high-quality AAAHC standards that will improve your risk prevention activities, policies, and procedures. Think of the AAAHC accreditation process as a gateway to the insider information you need to meet the gold standard of care.

For example, by knowing what to aim for via AAAHC standards, you might adopt new activities – such as checklists and screening tools – that can improve your services, boost efficiencies, mitigate risks, and reduce liabilities.

Next, a peer audit gives you a third-party perspective about how your facility operates. Don’t overlook the enormous value of getting evaluated and assessed by a group of peers.

As you prepare for accreditation, you cross-walk your policies and compliance documentation with AAAHC standards, which helps point out areas of need and provides good insights into how you can improve. The accreditation process involves bringing in a team of peers to review your department, your processes, your documents, and your overall operations to make sure you are meeting those high AAAHC standards.

This review from seasoned, accredited ambulatory health care professionals provides valuable insights into how to better serve your patients.

Finally, you get an improved process for credentialing and privileging – a complex endeavor for all facilities.

According to an AAAHC report, one of the biggest obstacles healthcare facilities face in meeting AAAHC standards is poorly managed credentialing of all these visiting physicians. The accreditation process provides some structure for how you track and manage privileges, such as performing more audits, adopting standardized forms, and using a credentialing verification organization. This helps ensure providers follow proper credentialing procedures and renew licenses and certifications before they expire.

While AAAHC provides some help, many of our customers use PowerDMS to streamline the process. How? By storing documents like preference cards, privileging, credentialing, licensing, peer reviews, training, policies, procedures, and any other relevant records.

While the AAAHC accreditation process can prove daunting, it’s certainly doable, especially with the right tools to ease the workload and shave hours off the time it takes to pull documentation together. In fact, you can cut your accreditation time in half.

Enter PowerDMS, a cloud-based accreditation management solution that helps you achieve AAAHC accreditation easier, faster, and with fewer resources from your facility.

Take a page from Colorado State University (CSU) Health Network, a student health center that serves more than 16,000 patients each year.

When CSU decided to go through the AAAHC accreditation process, the former Operations Director, Allis Gilbert, wanted to find a better solution for all the documentation required. Upon noticing an accumulation of binders used for CSU’s assessment/self-survey, Allis sought out a software solution.

After investing in PowerDMS, which streamlined the process and managed AAAHC accreditation electronically, CSU saved over $139k in staffing and supply costs.

Create a central repository for your files

Ditch your highlighters and binders. When you need to prove your operations meet AAAHC standards, you want to quick and easily access everything you need to compare your facility’s policies and procedures to the AAAHC standards manual.

Instead of combing through policy manual and highlighting standards – truly a tedious and time-consuming task – you can streamline the process by digitizing your files and storing them in a central repository.

Once you get all of your accreditation files into a single, digital repository, you can tap into the efficiency of PowerDMS, which publishes those AAAHC standards directly in our software.

With the built-in capabilities of PowerDMS, you use our digital tools to make those highlights – and audit and assess those highlights – electronically. This central repository not only speeds up the process, but it also saves you money on paper and printing costs.