October 15, 2009

Rogue Valley Medical Center and Three Rivers Community Hospital earn new hospital accreditations

Rogue Valley Medical Center (RVMC) and Three Rivers Community Hospital (TRCH) have both earned full three-year accreditation from DNV (Det Norske Veritas), the first and only Center for Medicare Services (CMS) approved hospital accreditation service that surveys annually and integrates the ISO 9001 quality methods, considered by many as the most demanding standards for healthcare performance, with Medicare Conditions of Participation (CoPs). The CoPs are standards hospitals must meet in order to participate in Medicare and Medicaid programs.

RVMC and TRCH are the first hospitals in Oregon to be accredited by DNV.

"We are very pleased to receive this very demanding accreditation," said Kent Brown, CEO, RVMC. "DNV holds hospitals to the highest standards of safety and performance, and we are confident that working with DNV will help us become an even better healthcare organization."

This accreditation requires an annual survey and the organization's continual compliance with the DNV Health Care Accreditation Process.

DNV uses a revolutionary, cooperative approach that creates new standards of excellence from the skills, experience and ingenuity that already exist within the hospital. This means RVMC and TRCH will excel in complying with healthcare standards and work with DNV to make improvements.

The ISO 9001 standards are a quality management system maintained by the International Organization for Standardization that is widely used in the manufacturing world and is now able to be adopted in the healthcare setting. Through the ISO program, RVMC and TRCH have implemented a framework that provides a general set of management principles to dictate how it will perform quality control.

"This is the means by which all good policies and procedures are built," said Win Howard, CEO, TRCH. "And having DNV on our team makes all the difference when it comes to patient outcomes."

All hospital accreditation organizations are independent organizations and accreditation by hospitals is completely voluntary. There are three hospital accreditation organizations, with the Joint Commission being the largest. However, Modern Healthcare magazine reports that many healthcare experts are saying that DNV is, "A refreshing change to the standard processes now available in the healthcare industry," and that DNV is actually ahead of other organizations in meeting the upcoming changes in Medicare standards.

"We have decided upon accreditation with DNV because we believe it will ultimately improve patient care," said Brown.