Blessing Health earns ISO 9001 quality management certification

QUINCY — Blessing and Illini Hospitals and all affiliated departments have been awarded by DNV full certification to the ISO 9001 Quality Management System. DNV is a global, independent, certification provider.

ISO 9001, the most widely-accepted quality management system in use around the world, is quickly gaining acceptance among U.S. healthcare providers as a foundation for quality and patient safety programs.

ISO 9001 brings science to the art of caregiving. It helps to standardize processes around actions that are proven to work, by the people doing the work. That empowers frontline workers while creating an environment of predictability for the organization. The impact of ISO 9001 within hospitals is the reduction or elimination of variation, so that critical work processes are performed consistently and best practices are ingrained throughout the organization.

ISO 9001 certification communicates to the public, as well as insurers and regulatory agencies, that the hospitals are pursuing quality constantly with discipline and transparency.

Blessing Health has worked with DNV to earn ISO 9001 certification for several years, undergoing multiple rounds of surveys of the many processes required to deliver safe and quality healthcare and making improvements to those processes along the way until all standards for certification were met.

In a press release, Kelly Proctor, president of DNV Healthcare USA Inc., said, “Blessing Health has worked hard to achieve this certification, and they have done so with unwavering commitment from their top leadership to make their hospital the best it can be. ISO 9001 certification isn’t just an award or trophy for something you’ve done, it’s public evidence that you are at the top of your game with an obvious plan in place to make excellence an every day objective.”

“Everyone who proudly wears a Blessing name tag is dedicated to providing the safest and most effective healthcare services possible,” said Mary Frances Barthel, chief quality and safety officer for Blessing Health. “ISO 9001 certification not only reflects that mission but helps to empower it. The effort required to achieve certification has fundamentally transformed the way we do business. ISO 9001 is ideally suited to the complex, people-intensive challenges of operating our hospitals and fulfilling our mission of improving the health of our communities.”