Moving to global standards for accreditation processes: the ExPeRT Project in a larger context

The ExPeRT (External Peer Review Techniques) Project, a European Union effort to examine and compare methods of health care evaluation currently in use, includes an assessment of accreditation as one such method. This article contributes to that examination by describing recent work, through the International Society; for Quality in Health Care (ISQua), to investigate and to enhance the international comparability of national health care accreditation programs, both existing and newly emerging.