Accreditation

If a college freshman stepped onto a campus where it was obvious that the administration had spent months eviscerating each other over petty slights instead of balancing the budget—or refusing to name a dean because a faction of the faculty resent his work on committees—the student would undoubtedly run screaming into the night looking for the fastest way out of there.

Every teaching hospital and academic medical center knows that the process of becoming accredited and re-accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) is an arduous task. The ACGME is attempting to ease this burden by introducing a new accreditation model called The Next Accreditation System (NAS). The NAS introduces dramatic changes in the way the ACGME accredits institutions and graduate medical education (GME) programs, with the initial implementation of the NAS to start in July 2013, followed by complete implementation in July 2014.