Abstract:

Purpose: This paper examines how hospital accreditation in European healthcare systems can be reframed from a compliance-oriented, episodic process into a continuous risk-based governance mechanism, supported by an integrated information architecture, capable of generating measurable organizational improvement.

Design / Methodology / Approach: A structured narrative synthesis (2010–2026) drawn from PubMed/PMC, Scopus, and OpenAlex informed conceptual framework development following Jaakkola (2020) and Whittemore and Knafl (2005). The paper is explicitly a conceptual contribution and does not constitute a systematic review.

Findings: The literature reports stronger accreditation effects on organizational processes, safety culture, and managerial routines than on isolated clinical outcomes. The principal implementation gap is not the absence of standards but the disconnection between risk identification, board-level accountability, incident learning, continuous performance monitoring, and the digital information infrastructure required to operationalize them.