The Compliance Team™ Celebrates 25 Years of Healthcare Accreditation Transformation
2019 marks 25 years since nurse/ entrepreneur, Sandra (Sandy) C. Canally, RN formed her healthcare evaluation firm, The Compliance Team, Inc.
In 1994, Sandy began by securing contracts with large mid-Atlantic managed care insurance firms to evaluate prospective physician network members and ancillary service providers. Over the course of 18-months, Sandy and her “team” credentialed over 4,000 provider organizations according to National Committee on Quality Insurance (NCQA) scoring measures. More than 2,000 of those evaluations required patient chart analysis of clinical measures.
By the mid-1990s, Sandy was convinced that the dominant healthcare accreditation programs of the day had grown unnecessarily complex and burdensome. She also concluded that the distractions they likely introduced contributed to less-than-optimal patient care performance.
“The starting point for improvement is to recognize the need.” ― Masaaki Imai
It was during those early years that she started to develop a radically different set of quality measures, along with the common-sense protocols to meet them. Her approach would dramatically simplify healthcare accreditation and turn the entire process into a much more reliable consumer-friendly indicator of patient care quality.
Thanks to Sandy’s chutzpah, buoyant optimism, and genius at keeping the “minutiae” to a minimum, The Compliance Team, Inc. is recognized today as the first for-profit, certified woman-owned and nurse-led, national healthcare accreditation organization.
“Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.” ― Florence Nightingale
Divinely Discontent
Sandy is the principal author and architect of The Compliance Team’s CMS-approved (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) Exemplary Provider® Award accreditation programs. In the early years, when she was not running the day-to-day business of her firm’s credentialing service and operating a part-time consulting business, Sandy spent most of her spare time at local book stores and law libraries in the Philadelphia area developing what was to become the nation’s first patient-centered, service specific, point-of-contact accreditation programs.
Once described as “divinely discontent” by her college religion professor, Sandy has spent the better part of the past 60-years serving on the front lines in nearly every sector of the United States’ healthcare delivery system.
Inspired in part by Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing, W. Edwards Deming’s Out of Crisis, and Masaaki Imai’s Gemba Kaizen, Sandy’s simplified programs make accreditation less of a burden to healthcare providers and a universal benefit to patients. Her accreditation programs are designed to shape a provider’s daily patient care and business operations into customized continuous quality improvement routines.
“It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.” ― W. Edwards Deming
The Compliance Team’s first program for DMEPOS (Durable Medical Equipment Prosthetics, Orthotics, and Supplies) was beta-tested for four years. In 1998, the first Exemplary Provider® Award was filed at the Library of Congress. Four months later, in March 1999, North Carolina Blue Cross/Blue Shield formally recognized The Compliance Team’s DMEPOS accreditation program – a full three years before CMS made it mandatory for DMEPOS providers to obtain accreditation.
After the passage of the Medicare Modernization Act in 2003, the Secretary of Health and Human Services authorized The Compliance Team to accredit Medicare Part-B DMEPOS providers. In 2014, the firm received the Secretary’s authority to accredit Medicare Part-A Rural Health Clinic (RHC), and in 2018, The Compliance Team received CMS approval to accredit Part-A Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) practitioners.
The Compliance Team today accredits thousands of provider organizations every year in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands while offering 17 industry-leading, operations-based, service specific accreditation programs for clinics, PCMH, pharmacy, DMEPOS and private duty healthcare provider organizations.
Becoming an Exemplary Provider starts here.

P.O. Box 160
905 Sheble Lane, Suite 102
Spring House, PA 19477
Office: (215) 654-9110
Fax: (215) 654-9068
© 2020 The Compliance Team, Inc.

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