In order to ensure efficient and effective health care, of equal high quality and accessibility, at all the levels of healthcare and across the entire Croatian territory, all operators in health services are required to establish, develop and maintain a system for assuring and improving the quality in healthcare. Legal requirement to introduce quality management systems into healthcare institutions notwithstanding, a quality management system is equally important in regard to the provision of crossborder healthcare, which guarantees to the patients from other EU countries that they would receive treatment under clearly defined standards of quality healthcare, ensuring safe and high-quality medical services. For this very reason it has become imperative that exact criteria for the basic standards of medical services and for the needs of medical tourism be determined, as so far they have neither been defined nor harmonised. To compete in foreign markets it is necessary to possess quality certification for both healthcare facilities and business processes, with the overarching goal of ensuring as good and as safe medical services as they are possible. The institution which holds a clear classification and/or accreditation for its facilities and/or services receives more recognition and has more competitive potential in foreign markets. Considering that the system for assurance and improvement of quality in healthcare represents one of the Croatian accreditation standards, introducing integrated systems for healthcare quality management has recently gained significant importance.The quality management system according to the ISO 9001 standard is employed today worldwide, and certifying the system is a generally accepted way of proving that the product or service meets the requirements of quality. The ISO 9001 standard is a generic standard that defines certain requirements for the quality management system which are applicable to all organizations, regardless of their type and scope, and consequently to healthcare organisations as well. Preparing to enter the demanding market of medical tourism, St. Catherine Specialty Hospital has introduced a quality management system as the first stage on its course to obtaining an international accreditation. St. Catherine Specialty Hospital received its first certification in 2013 for six quality improvement goals (diagnostics, treatment and rehabilitation of diseases and injuries of the locomotor system, magnetic resonance imaging of children and adults, minimally invasive interventions and spine surgery, acute pain treatment, one-day surgery and nursing care) and fourteen quality improvement indicators, the achievement of which was confirmed at the beginning of 2014 in the re-certification procedure which renewed its ISO 9001:2008 standard certification.
