Title: JCI, Temos, GHA: What Each Badge Actually Counts
Author: Arthur Harmash
Published: 2026-09-21
Source: https://lymyvoyage.com/articles/jci-temos-gha-accreditation-counts
Citations:
- https://temos-accreditation.com/AccreditedPartners/List.aspx
- https://medicaltourismwatch.com/countries-most-temos-accredited-hospitals/
- https://temos-worldwide.com/accreditation-programs/medical-care/
- https://www.jointcommission.org/en/about-us/recognizing-excellence/find-accredited-international-organizations
- https://medicaltourismwatch.com/countries-most-jci-accredited-hospitals/
- https://www.globalhealthcareaccreditation.com/accreditation
- https://www.globalhealthcareaccreditation.com/about-gha
- https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0294180
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4511980/
- https://ieea.ch/
---
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.
Three different badges. One word on all of them: "internationally accredited".
It sounds like a single standard that a clinic either meets or does not. So what does each badge actually certify?
Start with Temos. Its public directory lists 83 entries. Six of them are travel coordinators, not healthcare facilities at all. That leaves 77 clinics and hospitals, in 16 countries.
Now the part the badge does not show. Temos runs two levels. The base level has no international-patient requirement. Only the upper tier, Excellence in Medical Tourism, assesses how a facility handles patients who travelled to reach it. Sixteen of the 77 hold it.
Joint Commission International is far larger, and counts something else again. Its directory lists organisations, not hospitals. One entry is an oil company's network of 31 site clinics. Another is a laboratory group with 29 branches.
The counterargument matters here. These schemes are not pretending. Global Healthcare Accreditation says plainly that it complements clinical accreditation rather than replacing it, and it requires applicants to already hold a recognised clinical accreditation. The confusion is created by marketing, not by the accreditors.
What none of this settles is whether an accredited hospital treats you better. Two independent systematic reviews, published eight years apart, both found the evidence too thin and too inconsistent to establish that link.
So read a badge as a description, not a score. It tells you which scheme assessed the organisation, and against which standards. It does not tell you that your surgeon is better, and it was never built to.
## What each badge actually counts
| | Joint Commission International | Temos | Global Healthcare Accreditation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unit counted | Organisations, which may contain many facilities[^4] | Individual facilities and coordinators[^1] | Medical travel programmes[^6] |
| Directory size | 54 pages of 20 results as of 21 Sep 2026[^4] | 83 entries, of which 77 are healthcare facilities[^1] | Not published as a count[^7] |
| Covers the travel pathway | Programmes are organised by care setting[^4] | Only at the Excellence tier[^3] | Yes, that is its stated subject[^6] |
| Needs another accreditation first | No | No | Yes, for most applicants[^6] |
## 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.[^1]
Six of those entries are medical travel coordinators — agencies, not clinics.[^1] 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.[^1]
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.[^2] Its methodology note says it excluded six medical travel coordinators — the same six-entry gap this recount found seven weeks later.[^2] 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.[^1] 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.[^3] 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.[^3]
Sixteen of the 77 healthcare facilities in Temos's own directory carry the Excellence tier — the only one of its two levels that assesses how a facility handles patients who travelled to reach it.[^1][^3]
Those 16 sit in Egypt (5), Türkiye (5), Thailand (2), and one each in Greece, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Panama.[^1] Georgia, which holds more Temos listings than any other country, holds none of them.[^1]
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.[^1] 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.[^4]
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.[^4] The fourth is a medical laboratory group with 29 branches under one entry.[^4]
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.[^4] 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.[^5] 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.[^5] 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.[^4] 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".[^6] Those programmes, it says, "traditionally focus on the quality and patient safety aspects of care for the entire organization".[^6] What it reviews instead is the medical travel programme, across patient experience, sustainable business processes and patient-focused clinical processes.[^6]
That has a practical consequence. Most applicants must already hold accreditation from a recognised national or international agency before they can apply.[^6] A facility holding only this badge is unusual, and the scheme offers a separate certification route for organisations without prior clinical accreditation.[^6] 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.[^7]
## 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.[^3]
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.[^1][^4] 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.[^4]
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.[^8][^9]
[^1]: https://temos-accreditation.com/AccreditedPartners/List.aspx — Temos International GmbH, "Temos Accredited and Assessed partners". Counts and per-country figures in this article are this publication's own tally of the directory's 83 listed entries. Accessed Sep 21, 2026.
[^2]: https://medicaltourismwatch.com/countries-most-temos-accredited-hospitals/ — Medical Tourism Watch, "Countries with the most Temos-accredited hospitals", a trade publication reporting its own review of the Temos directory on Aug 1, 2026. Accessed Sep 21, 2026.
[^3]: https://temos-worldwide.com/accreditation-programs/medical-care/ — Temos International GmbH, "International Hospital Accreditation - Medical Care", describing the Quality in Medical Care and Excellence in Medical Tourism programmes. Accessed Sep 21, 2026.
[^4]: https://www.jointcommission.org/en/about-us/recognizing-excellence/find-accredited-international-organizations — Joint Commission International, "Find Accredited International Organizations". Directory size, programme list and individual entries are this publication's own reading of the directory. Accessed Sep 21, 2026.
[^5]: https://medicaltourismwatch.com/countries-most-jci-accredited-hospitals/ — Medical Tourism Watch, "Countries with the most JCI-accredited hospitals", a trade publication, last updated Aug 26, 2026. Accessed Sep 21, 2026.
[^6]: https://www.globalhealthcareaccreditation.com/accreditation — Global Healthcare Accreditation, "GHA Accreditation", on programme scope and eligibility. Accessed Sep 21, 2026.
[^7]: https://www.globalhealthcareaccreditation.com/about-gha — Global Healthcare Accreditation, "What is Global Healthcare Accreditation?". Accessed Sep 21, 2026.
[^8]: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0294180 — PLOS ONE, "Impact of hospital accreditation on quality improvement in healthcare: A systematic review", by researchers at Zarqa University and the University of Aberdeen (published Dec 5, 2023). Accessed Sep 21, 2026.
[^9]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4511980/ — BMC Health Services Research, "A systematic review of hospital accreditation: the challenges of measuring complex intervention effects" (published 2015), via PubMed Central. Accessed Sep 21, 2026.
[^10]: https://ieea.ch/ — International Society for Quality in Health Care External Evaluation Association (ISQua EEA), describing its International Accreditation Programme for accrediting bodies. Accessed Sep 21, 2026.