JCI, Temos, GHA: What Each Badge Actually Counts

Joint Commission International. Temos. Global Healthcare Accreditation. Clinics treating foreign patients display these badges, and the word attached to all of them is the same: accredited.

The badges are not the same size, and they do not measure the same thing. Two of the three count different kinds of organisation. One of them cannot be held without holding another accreditation first. And the number of clinics behind each badge depends entirely on what you agree to count.

What each badge actually counts

Temos: 83 entries, 77 clinics, 16 at the tier that checks travel

Temos publishes its accredited and assessed partners as a single public list. Read on 21 September 2026, that list held 83 entries across 16 countries.²

Six of those entries are medical travel coordinators — agencies, not clinics.² Removing them leaves 77 healthcare facilities. Georgia holds 29 of the 77, Türkiye 20 and Egypt 8. Those three countries account for 57 of the 77 between them.²

That 77 is independently corroborated. Medical Tourism Watch, a trade publication, reviewed the same directory on 1 August 2026 and published 77, with the same per-country figures.⁶ Its methodology note says it excluded six medical travel coordinators — the same six-entry gap this recount found seven weeks later.⁶ Two counts, taken seven weeks apart by different readers, agree exactly.

The 77 are also not all hospitals. The directory records a facility type for every entry, so the mix behind the badge can be sorted out. Hospitals dominate it: 40 secondary-care facilities and 21 tertiary-care ones. The rest are smaller: 5 dental centres, 5 reproductive care centres, 3 ambulatory or diagnostic centres, 2 day-surgery centres and 1 dental group practice.² So 61 of the 77 are hospitals in the ordinary sense.

The more useful number is smaller. By Temos's own account of its programmes, it runs two levels, and they are not variations of one standard. The base programme, Quality in Medical Care, requires a licence, an improvement system and ethical compliance. Temos lists no international-patient requirement for it.⁵ The upper tier, Excellence in Medical Tourism, is the one that assesses the cross-border pathway: a dedicated international patient department covering pre-travel through post-treatment follow-up, and round-the-clock access to multilingual staff or interpreters.⁵

Those 16 sit in Egypt (5), Türkiye (5), Thailand (2), and one each in Greece, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Panama.² Georgia, which holds more Temos listings than any other country, holds none of them.²

One wrinkle affects how the labels read inside Europe. Temos states that it cannot award accreditation in European Union jurisdictions for regulatory reasons, and issues an "Assessed Organization" certificate there instead, assessed against the same standards.² Inside the European Union, then, the difference between "accredited" and "assessed" is a regulatory artefact rather than a quality judgement.

Joint Commission International: a directory of organisations, not hospitals

Joint Commission International's directory is far larger than Temos's, and it counts a different unit. On 21 September 2026 it ran to 54 pages at 20 results per page.¹

The unit being counted is the problem. The directory lists organisations, and an organisation can be almost any size. Its first entry is an oil company's site-clinic network, with 31 individual clinics listed under one accreditation.¹ The fourth is a medical laboratory group with 29 branches under one entry.¹

The accreditation programmes are organised by care setting rather than by patient origin. The directory's own filter lists nine: hospital, academic medical centre, ambulatory care, laboratory, home care, long-term care, medical transport, primary care and enterprise accreditation.¹ A medical traveller comparing hospitals is reading a list that also contains laboratories, ambulances and home-care providers.

This is why published country counts appear as ranges rather than figures. Medical Tourism Watch puts Saudi Arabia at 80 to 100 accredited organisations, the United Arab Emirates at 70 to 90, Thailand at 60 to 65, India at 40 to 47 and Turkey at 38 to 42.⁷ Its methodology states that it estimates active hospitals and hospital-level facilities, and does not attempt to count every laboratory, small clinic or disease-specific certification.⁷ The ranges are an honest response to a directory that does not resolve into hospitals.

One more detail is worth checking yourself. The page calls itself the complete list of current accredited organisations, yet that first entry's accreditation is marked as expired in September 2023.¹ A directory can be authoritative and still need reading closely.

Global Healthcare Accreditation: a layer, not an alternative

Of the three schemes compared here, Global Healthcare Accreditation is the only one built entirely around medical travel. It is explicit that this makes it an addition rather than a substitute.

In its own words, its accreditation "complements existing national and international clinical accreditation programs".³ Those programmes, it says, "traditionally focus on the quality and patient safety aspects of care for the entire organization".³ What it reviews instead is the medical travel programme, across patient experience, sustainable business processes and patient-focused clinical processes.³

That has a practical consequence. Most applicants must already hold accreditation from a recognised national or international agency before they can apply.³ A facility holding only this badge is unusual, and the scheme offers a separate certification route for organisations without prior clinical accreditation.³ Global Healthcare Accreditation does not publish a total count of accredited organisations on the pages reviewed here, so the denominator that exists for the other two schemes is not available for this one.⁴

What the badges do not tell you

They do not tell you that treatment will go better. This is the part marketing leaves out, and the evidence behind it is not close.

A 2023 systematic review in PLOS ONE, by researchers at Zarqa University and the University of Aberdeen, examined 21 studies. It reports "inconsistent findings about the impact of accreditation on improving healthcare quality and outcomes, and there is scant evidence about its effectiveness."⁸ The authors could not perform a meta-analysis, because the studies varied too much in method and in what they measured.⁸

That is not an isolated result. A 2015 review in BMC Health Services Research reached the same place from a different set of studies, reporting that "due to scant evidence, no conclusions could be reached to support its effectiveness."⁹ It also names a structural problem: hospitals choose to seek accreditation, so self-selection and weak controls make it hard to attribute any improvement to the accreditation itself.⁹

Two independent reviews, eight years apart, agree that the link is unestablished. Neither says accreditation is worthless. Both say the evidence does not currently support treating a badge as a predictor of your outcome.

There is also a layer above the accreditors. The International Society for Quality in Health Care External Evaluation Association assesses accrediting bodies rather than hospitals: it does not accredit health services directly, but evaluates the organisations that write the standards and carry out assessments.¹⁰ Whether a given scheme holds that recognition is a separate question from whether a clinic holds the scheme's badge.

How to check a badge before you book

Ask which scheme, and at which level. "Temos accredited" and "Temos Excellence in Medical Tourism" are different findings about a facility, and only the second speaks to how it handles travelling patients.⁵

Look the facility up in the accreditor's own directory rather than trusting the logo on the clinic's site. Both directories used here are public.²¹ Check the decision date and the status while you are there.

Ask what the accreditation covers. If the entry is an organisation with many facilities, confirm that the one treating you is inside the accredited scope.¹

Then treat the badge as a description of a process, not a prediction about your surgery. On the evidence available, that is all it can honestly carry.⁸⁹