Hospital quality management: the perspective of a Belgian academic medical center.

In this article, we explain why from our perspective as the largest academic medical center in the country, we consider it to be part of our mission to contribute to the elaboration of a value-based health care organization system. We describe our hospital quality management system and how we think that this can deliver added value by introducing lean principles in the care process. We also reflect on the importance of hospital accreditation and external benchmarking in the continuous quality improvement culture within the hospital.