Long before “doing more with less” became a leadership cliché, Phillip Crosby, quality guru, known for the concept of Zero Defects and author of the influential book, Quality Is Free, showed that quality doesn’t drain resources — it protects them. Crosby’s classic ideas come alive in today’s behavioral health market—where quality truly costs less than chaos. Seen this way, Accreditation is a financial strategy that delivers a clear ROI of accreditation, realized through fewer denials, lower risk, and stronger staff retention.
Philip Crosby wasn’t saying quality has no cost.
Lack of quality is already on your P&L. Avoidable failures—rework, preventable incidents, process defects—burn real dollars every month. You know it, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ, 2024) confirms it. Previous independent studies have shown ROI of Accreditation to be as high as 623%!
Crosby’s point: the cost of doing it right once is lower than the cost of doing it over. In behavioral health, accreditation operationalizes that math—turning daily chaos into more predictable performance and cutting the hidden tax of rework, denials, incidents, and churn.
Accreditation doesn’t create quality. You and your people do, of course. But Accreditation supplies the operating discipline—so defects drop, denials fall, risk recedes, and staffing stabilizes. This isn’t paying for manuals or shelfware; it’s investing in quality at the point of work. That’s not overhead—it’s return on reliability.
If you don’t buy quality, you rent chaos—at premium rates. Accreditation is a cheaper way to run the work.
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Crosby’s Tenets – Driving the ROI of Accreditation
Conformance to Requirements: Policies and workflows should match what staff actually do. Every mismatch is a hidden cost waiting to hit your bottom line.
Prevention over Inspection: Catch issues upstream—before they require a corrective action plan or payer appeal.
Zero Defects (as a mindset): Build defect-proofed systems around your highest-risk areas—suicide risk assessment, medication reconciliation, and documentation that drives revenue.
Measure the Price of Nonconformance: Track the cost of repeat problems. You can’t manage what you can’t measure—and most organizations underestimate how expensive “workarounds” really are.
Bottom Line…“Quality is free. It’s not a gift, but it’s free. The ‘unquality’ things are what cost money.” Accreditation is how you make that statement auditable, measurable, and fundable..
A Healthcare Lens: Brent C. James, MD
To anchor Crosby’s idea in modern care delivery, look to Brent C. James, MD, MStat (Intermountain; now Stanford). Across decades of outcomes-plus-cost work, James showed that reducing unwarranted clinical variation improves results while lowering total cost—the same logic Crosby taught, applied to healthcare.
A concise primer is Dr. James’ foundational talk; note the section explaining why “better care is usually cheaper care. As Intermountain’s longtime Chief Quality Officer (now at Stanford), Dr. James showed that reducing unwarranted clinical variation improves outcomes and lowers total costs. See his approach.
Core takeaway: Standardize to best-known practice → measure outcomes and direct cost → close the loop with front-line teams. In behavioral health, the “waste” shows up as readmissions, inconsistent documentation, avoidable ED use, and payer friction—the exact cost centers accreditation helps control.
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More Evidence on How Quality Pays for Itself
- Accreditation lowers hidden costs (rework, events)
Organizations actively using accreditation frameworks see reductions in sentinel events and unplanned rework—direct savings in investigation time, liability exposure, and repeat effort.
See more → (Brody, 2025 – peer-reviewed analysis; PubMed) - Accreditation readiness drives access & payer confidence
Readiness supports CCBHC eligibility and strengthens payer confidence—improving odds of sustainable contracts and value-based participation.
See more → (National Council for Mental Wellbeing, 2024: “CCBHC Impact”) - Accreditation as an operating system = positive ROI
Independent analyses show triple-digit ROI when accreditation is embedded in daily operations—not treated as a one-time project.