Accreditation by the American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA) is voluntary. It is not required to operate a practice, yet only about 15% of veterinary hospitals carry it — which is exactly why it signals quality to clients and referral partners. Earning and keeping it means measuring your hospital against a large, evolving body of standards and proving, on site, that your team works the way your documentation says it does.
What AAHA accreditation involves
AAHA maintains more than 900 standards spanning patient care, anesthesia, surgery, pain management, contagious disease, medical records, and the management side of the practice — including controlled-substance standards. An accredited hospital is re-evaluated every three years by an on-site evaluator who tours the facility, reviews records, and confirms the standards are met in practice and not just on paper.
Among the documentation a practice submits prior to that evaluation is an employee manual, or a policies-and-procedures handbook. Staff training is also evaluated. The through-line is simple: AAHA wants to see written protocols that staff are actually trained on, and it wants the practice to be able to demonstrate that training is happening.
The gap between "we have a manual" and "we can prove training"
A handbook on a shelf — or a shared drive — answers the first question an evaluator might ask, but not the second. Having the document is one thing; showing that every member of the team has read and acknowledged it, and re-confirmed it after each revision, is another. That second half is where most practices scramble, reconstructing sign-off from memory and email threads in the weeks before a re-evaluation.
How Accedo helps
Accedo is built for exactly that second half. You keep authoring the protocols AAHA expects; Accedo records that your team acknowledged them.
- Publish each protocol from your handbook as a policy, and auto-assign it to the relevant staff and groups so no one is missed.
- Collect a dated signature from every signer, building a per-person record of who acknowledged which protocol and when.
- Re-acknowledge on a recurring cadence so the team re-confirms protocols after each update — handy on a three-year accreditation cycle where documents change between evaluations.
- Export the audit trail as timestamped evidence you can present during the on-site evaluation, instead of assembling it by hand.
Accedo does not grant or manage your accreditation, and it does not interpret which standards apply to your hospital — that is between your practice and AAHA. What it gives you is a clean, dated answer to "can you show the team was trained on this?" — so that part of the visit is one you walk into prepared rather than dreading.