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July 21, 2015
ISO 9001 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, 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 – 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?
Hospital performance statistics and articles about services falling short of expectations are rarely out of the news these days, and it’s 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:
So, these processes, along with the other core principles and clauses of ISO 9001, could help to bring uniformity and continuity to a network of hospitals. But, what would be the benefit of such an undertaking?
We have examined why it can be envisioned that ISO 9001 standardization would help hospitals, but exactly what benefits could be expected?
So, it can be seen that although most hospitals surely use processes like internal audit and risk management, there could be real benefits from the standardization of processes across multiple sites within the ISO 9001 accreditation process. Improving customer satisfaction is the best reason to implement ISO 9001, which you can read more about in this previous article: Handling customer satisfaction with code of conduct and complaints procedure, and if you can improve service in a key area where better processes and continual improvement can mean saving lives, the benefits are even greater. The project size and costs may be great, but as with most organizations that have pursued ISO 9001, it will soon be apparent that the benefits and savings would be greater.
Why not use this free Gap analysis tool to assess where your organization is currently versus the ISO 9001 standard?