Case
Abstract
Due to rising health care costs and resource constraints, this is an unprecedented time for health care leaders in terms of policy, information technology, and organizational change. The impact of health care policy interventions including accreditation has been researched adopting a variety of methodologies and research designs. There is a lack of rigorous research including the methodological challenges of measuring outcomes and linking cause and effect to these complex, changing, long-term policy interventions in health care organizations. Most studies have used cross-sectional designs and/or comparative static analysis of data at two points in time. Due to the dynamic nature of accreditation, such methodologies can only identify statistical associations between variables but cannot alone establish causality. This case study provides a reflective account of the first empirical interrupted time series analysis of accreditation designed to examine the impact on hospital quality measures. Lessons learnt such as selection of appropriate measures and methodological considerations will be detailed in this case study.