Self-Assessment Portal

Many hands are involved in effectively treating a patient. From the administration, to the doctors, to the nurses on the ward, everyone works together to record and transmit vital information about a patient's status and medical history to ensure their safety and well-being.

The same is true when an organization wishes to achieve accreditation. To improve the quality of their processes and outcomes, health organizations must create multiple multidisciplinary teams that work jointly to assess their current situation, determine gaps in performance, develop an action plan, and execute that plan while monitoring progress at all times.

Empower Accreditation Self-Assessment Portal, our secure, online self-assessment and accreditation survey preparation tool, helps accreditors enhance the effectiveness of their accreditation programs and their clients' ability to develop and execute the action plans necessary for improving service quality.

Designed by examining over 50 years worth of national and international accreditation processes, Empower is

Authoritative

For an accreditation program to be effective, it must above all be current and relevant to its users. The ability for accreditors to easily post and update their library of official current standards is just one of the useful tools available.

Quick and easy self-service updates to the standards library help provide a consistent structure for health care teams to identify areas of improvement and guide their action plans, which in turn helps them improve care and raise the bar on performance.

Customizable

Organizations fill out their online profile with details that help their accreditors determine which standards and testing criteria apply to them. Organizations are then able to complete a self-assessment questionnaire that is relevant to their size, type, and the services they provide. Self-assessments can be kept confidential at the organization level or be shared with the surveyors and accrediting organization.

Combined with the self-reflection, critical examination, and collaboration required for successfully achieving accreditation, our customized self-assessment and Quality Performance Roadmap planning tools help accreditors better support health care organizations in their efforts to identify and manage the steps they need to take towards effectively improving quality and becoming accredited.

Collaborative

Put the power of progress in the hands of those on the front lines. During the course of accreditation, it can be difficult for team members to translate the standards and criteria into a meaningful plan of action that fits their own situation.

Empower provides the option to integrate self- assessment questionnaires for all staff, which encourages front-line engagement and collaboration. Through the organization-wide reflection and critical examination of processes and procedures, your clients' teams will gather more meaningful evidence to support compliance to standards, and develop more accurate action plans for achieving organizational goals.

Available Anywhere

Without a system in place, comparative data can easily be lost. And, the sustained effort required during the accreditation process can lead to fatigue among participants, which should be avoided at all costs when dealing with sensitive patient safety and quality improvement initiatives.

Empower's accreditation tools are accessible anywhere, at any time, via the internet through our secure online portal, or offline through a local installation. Your clients' teams can access and review detailed survey results, action plans, and Quality Performance Roadmaps at their convenience throughout the accreditation process. Empower also provides the opportunity to move to a paperless accreditation system.

Quality Performance Roadmap

Any organization can make quality improvements in the short term. The key is to maintain quality improvement activities over the long term until the desired results are achieved. The best way to accomplish this is to measure and monitor performance on an ongoing basis.

All information from completed self-assessment questionnaires is collated and presented online in the Quality Performance Roadmap. Here organizations can find a detailed, customized outline of key performance indicators and action items based on their self-assessment results. Levels of priority and risk for areas for improvement, as determined by the accreditor, are also found in this area.

Information remains on the portal long after self-assessments have been completed, so at any time, organizations can review their action plan, detailed standards, and improvement criteria, as well as submit updates and evidence of their progress to their accreditor.

Collating this information into a single source allows health care organizations' internal teams and support system s to collaborate and use this framework to prioritize action plans, specify performance measures, and set timelines within the organization. Eventually, a client organization's teams and management can begin to monitor performance indicators and benchmark their progress against these baseline measures.

The Quality Performance Roadmap provides organizations with a record of the steps that have been taken, as well as an outline of the distance that has yet to be traveled on the journey toward accreditation.

For more information, contact international@accreditation.ca.