URAC Accreditation Tips

When you submit a document to URAC through AccrediNet, URAC's online document submission application, you will need to submit a citation for each document.  In fact, for standards that have several parts (which URAC calls "elements"), you may be submitting a submission for several, or even all, of the elements.

What is essential to know about these citations is their purpose, which is very important:  to direct the URAC reviewer's attention to the specific portion of the document which demonstrates compliance with that particular element.  

It is rare that an entire document supports an element.  Much more common is when a particular section (e.g., Page 3, Section I.V.3.a.) supports a particular element (e.g., Core 8(g)).  In such a case, you want to make it easy for the reviewer to find that particular support.  So, in this case, your citation for Core 8(g) should read: "Page 3, Section I.V.3.a.

You'll want to keep it simple.  Remember, the citation's sole purpose is to make the reviewer's job easy, so don't clutter it up with a lot of information that doesn't do that.  Here are some anti-clutter tips:

• Don't include the name of the document.  The reviewer already knows the name of the document -- it's right above the citation.
• Don't quote the language of the element.  The reviewer already knows that, too -- it's immediately to the left of the citations.
• Don't refer to an entire section of the document (or worse yet, the entire document) when only one small portion of the document supports the element.
• Don't combine several documents into one, except in the rarest of circumstances.  The default decision is to submit each document separately.  About the only time you'd want to combine documents would be if you were running up against URAC's 9-document/standard limit.  In that case, you might consider combining documents, but only if all documents are absolutely necessary to demonstrate compliance with the standards.

So, there are the don't's.  How about the do's?  

• Do make sure that each element of a standard is cited by at least one document you are submitting.  Let me be clear.  This doesn't mean you have to have super-documents that meet all the elements of a standard.  Rather, it means that, when taken together, all of your documents must show support for all of the elements.  No support for an element means no points for that element.