The role of accreditation in transforming health services management education

The core function of the Accrediting Commission on Education for Health Services Administration (ACEHSA) is to improve quality in health services management education. All specialized accrediting agencies provide quality assurance by developing standards of quality, assessing programs and reporting to stakeholders, as part of their public accountability function (Council for Higher Education Accreditation). Standards of quality derive from the level of competency considered essential within the domain of practice of health services managers. Accreditation review by ACEHSA is oriented to quality improvement and quality assurance, which have different purposes and are difficult to accomplish in the same process. The purpose of this paper is to discuss ACEHSA's role in evaluating the quality of health services management education programs in North America. The first objective is to describe the process of defining quality and to identify the skills, knowledge and abilities derived from it. The second objective is to discuss the measurement of quality, including using standardized measures, and determining whether the purpose is quality improvement or quality assurance. The third objective is to examine how quality measures are reported, and how reporting impacts the quality assessment process. Finally, the future role of ACEHSA is discussed, with regard to benchmarking measures of quality and publicly reporting relative levels of academic program quality.