{"id":4265,"date":"2015-07-21T17:05:25","date_gmt":"2015-07-21T17:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/multiacademstg.wpengine.com\/9001academy\/?p=4265"},"modified":"2024-11-21T18:05:25","modified_gmt":"2024-11-21T18:05:25","slug":"would-hospitals-benefit-from-iso-9001","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/9001academy\/blog\/2015\/07\/21\/would-hospitals-benefit-from-iso-9001\/","title":{"rendered":"Would hospitals benefit from ISO 9001?"},"content":{"rendered":"

ISO 9001<\/a> is a universally used quality management standard, adopted by organizations all over the world to standardize and improve the service given to customers. The standard is used across all sectors of business, but is more prevalent in some than others. In my time working in both the electronics and document conversion and storage business, ISO 9001 was a critical customer requirement for different reasons. The electronics industry, which you can read about in this previous blog article: Tips for ISO 9001 in the electronics industry<\/a>, has an unwritten rule that if you wanted to do business overseas, then ISO 9001 accreditation is required to display your commitment to customer quality. In the scanning and data conversion business, contracts with banks and government bodies mean that ISO 9001 is a vital requirement where the end user demands standardization of processes, on-time delivery, and the knowledge that a formal corrective action procedure is present to deal with any outages or process escapes that may occur. So, during a recent discussion with an organization that provided a service to a hospital, it struck me as very odd that this level of quality management is not an industry standard in our hospitals \u2013 after all, what is more important to the general healthcare of the population than the way that critical healthcare is managed? This got me thinking: Would hospitals benefit from ISO 9001 accredited quality management systems?<\/p>\n

ISO 9001 for hospitals: Why?<\/h2>\n

Hospital performance statistics and articles about services falling short of expectations are rarely out of the news these days, and it\u2019s normally the negative statistics and stories that catch the attention of the media. While all hospitals are measured by national and regional governments in terms of certain key performance indicators, it seems that internal performance, and therefore quality management can vary massively from hospital to hospital. So, given that hospitals are asked to perform versus the same KPIs, is it not strange that each individual hospital will try and attain these objectives using different internal methods? Let us examine what a standardized ISO 9001 process would bring to hospitals, and the components of the standards that could bring value across a national hospital network:<\/p>\n