Instituto Técnico para la Acreditación de Establecimientos de Salud (Technical Institute for the Accreditation of Healthcare Establishments, ITAES) is an accrediting entity for health institutions recognised for developing healthcare quality and safety standards with a focus on continuous improvement. Headquartered in Argentina and with a presence throughout Latin America, ITAES has been working with hospitals, clinics and other healthcare facilities for more than 30 years. The Institute has conducted over 1,000 external quality evaluations. ITAES is an institutional member of ISQua and an ISQua EEA accredited organisation.
The Quality Indicators Program for Medical Care (PICAM, for its acronym in Spanish) currently includes more than 70 entities from Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay, which work together with ITAES experts using benchmarking methodology.
Collecting 67 easily obtainable data is proposed through direct documentation (primary sources) from different service areas, in order to facilitate periodic comparison. Thus, 30 comparability indicators are systematically constructed and self-referenced in time and between participating healthcare facilities.
In 2016, ITAES decided that the PICAM is mandatory in one of its Accreditation Programs, helping healthcare facilities understand the importance of this intra-institutional reflection process. Although information is not everything, it is a great asset for making decisions and taking action. In this sense, we can consider that “quality is doing what needs to be done, even if they are not watching us” (quote by Henry Ford).
This program is ideal for helping resolve a frequent paradox in healthcare facilities: the wealth of records accumulated in computer systems can coexist with poverty of information for management due to the lack of tools to exploit this data and convert it into indicators.
You can learn more PICAM by reading the article here.
For further information about ITAES and the work they do please visit their website: ITAES
