UAB Healthcare Quality and Safety program among first in CAHME accreditation

The accreditation reflects the highest standards of educational excellence in both health care and business management.
Written by: Jessica Jernigan
Media contact: Adam Pope


shp streamThe University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Health Services Administration Graduate Program in Healthcare Quality and Safety has received accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management in Education, making it one of the first two programs of their kind to achieve this milestone. 

Following on the heels of the program’s certification by CAHME in 2019, the accreditation reflects the highest standards of educational excellence in both health care and business management. 

“Practitioners and academics developed CAHME’s Accreditation standards to ensure that students were well prepared to address the unique challenges of the field,” said Anthony Stanowski, president and CEO of CAHME. “Importantly, UAB played an overall foundational role in the accreditation development with Christy Harris Lemak, Ph.D., answering the call to facilitate the organization in 2019. Initially, Sue Feldman, R.N., M.Ed., Ph.D., and later Allyson Hall, Ph.D., made significant contributions to developing the accreditation standards.”

The UAB HQS program can be completed fully online and is designed for driven professionals passionate about shaping a safer environment for their patients. 

“Becoming CAHME-accredited means the UAB HQS program has demonstrated that we ‘practice what we preach,’” said Hall, director of UAB’s HQS program and professor in the Department of Health Services Administration. “This achievement reflects our hard work in consistently engaging in continuous quality improvement to enhance our competency-based educational experience. We are excited to be one of the first graduate programs in health care quality and safety to become accredited.”

Accreditation is at the core of CAHME’s mission to advance the quality of health care management education. Graduates of the CAHME-accredited UAB HQS program benefit from this honor by maximizing their investment and future career opportunities as health care leaders. Successful students include administrators, physicians, nurses, patient safety officers and quality managers.

To learn more about UAB’s HQS program, click here.