The concept of accreditation was first introduced by the American College of Surgeons about a 100 years ago and was developed in 1980s and 1990s. This concept has been lately developed in low income and middle-income countries to promote health care services.

Accreditation is a voluntary process with the purpose of helping people and reaching the standards through the external accreditation evaluation. Accreditation not only focuses on gaining the accreditation standards, it also emphasizes on the continuous improvement of standards. Therefore, accreditation as a systematic tool provides the safety of the patients, continues improvement of patient care quality and helps the patients and health care centers’ managers.

Standards of Hospital Accreditation

Accreditation standards can be categorized based on characteristics of the heath care institution. Some of these categories are:

• Hospitals

• Academic medical center hospitals

• Ambulatory care

• Clinical laboratory

• Home care

• Long term care

• Medical transport organizations

• Primary care centers

Accreditation standards are comprehensive and multi-faceted and includes all the activities and sections of the health care institution.

Some areas of operations of accreditation standards related to the joint commission accreditation body are:

• Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (QPS)

• Prevention and Control of Infections (PCI)

Iran’s unique geographical position, its old history in medicine and allied sciences and its high-quality low-cost medical services can significantly influence the medical tourism and the financial dimensions of Iranian medicine. The other dimension of the medical tourism can be influenced by reaching to the purposes defined in the Fifth Development Plan law of Iran and Iran Vision Plan. In order to accomplish this goal, the international healthcare accreditation unit has started its activities in the office of Global Strategies and International Affairs, Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS) since September 2013 with the purpose of receiving international hospital accreditation for all the hospitals affiliated with TUMS.

Studies have been done about selecting the proper international accreditation body whose results should be confirmed to consider more factors such as the presence of accreditation body in Iran, the recognition of the intended accreditation body, the costs, contacting the accreditation body and writing the contract as the primary steps in beginning the accreditation process.