Abstract

Accreditations are commonly seen as a yearly requirement to be dealt with. Navicent Health, located in central Georgia, experimented with making the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001:2015 accreditation its focus. The integration timeline spaced out the expectations with the final result in year four being fully accredited and surveyed as one system. Navicent spent the first year working with management to learn and move toward the standard implementation. The second year it worked on transforming the culture by streamlining knowledge transfer, making continuous improvements, giving performance-based incentives and working on structure and maturity. Year three was spent preparing the whole system to be accredited as a full organization instead of looking at small parts of a big system. With the proper implementation plan, Navicent Health was able to transition toward high performance and a lower number of nonconformities, which need to be fixed on a specific timeline to keep the accreditation.