What Is NCQA Accreditation?
The National Committee for Quality Assurance — known as NCQA — is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving healthcare quality across the United States. Founded in 1990, NCQA accredits health plans, behavioral health organizations, and medical practices against rigorous standards of quality, patient access, and clinical effectiveness. NCQA accreditation is widely recognized by employers, health plans, and government agencies as a benchmark of healthcare quality.
For Patients & Families
Why NCQA Accreditation Matters
NCQA is perhaps best known for accrediting health insurance plans, but its reach extends into behavioral health organizations and managed behavioral health organizations — entities that coordinate mental health and addiction treatment services on behalf of health plans and employers. For addiction treatment specifically, NCQA accreditation signals that a program operates within a quality management framework aligned with national healthcare standards.
NCQA’s evaluation process examines how well an organization manages care, measures outcomes, and ensures that patients can actually access the services they need. This includes reviewing whether clinical guidelines are followed, how disputes and appeals are handled, and whether the organization tracks and acts on performance data.
NCQA accreditation is less common among individual treatment facilities and more common among the managed behavioral health organizations that contract with them. When you see an NCQA badge on a facility listing, it indicates the provider operates under a quality framework that meets NCQA’s standards — a meaningful signal of organizational rigor.
What Gets Evaluated
Key Standards an NCQA-Accredited Organization Must Meet
Our Process
How We Verify NCQA Accreditation
When a facility owner claims their listing on our directory, they can upload their NCQA accreditation certificate directly through their dashboard. The certificate is stored securely in a private bucket — it is never displayed publicly.
Our team reviews the submission manually. Once approved, an NCQA accreditation badge appears on the facility’s listing page and on city-level directory cards. We do not fabricate, assume, or infer accreditation — the facility must provide proof, and we must verify it.
For full details on what “verified” means on our platform and the limitations of our review, see our Verification Policy.
A Note on NCQA and Individual Facilities
NCQA accreditation is more commonly held by managed behavioral health organizations and health plans than by individual treatment facilities. If a facility in our directory displays an NCQA badge, it may reflect accreditation at the organizational or network level rather than the individual site level. The underlying credential is real and verified — the scope simply differs from CARF or Joint Commission, which evaluate individual facilities directly.
An Important Distinction
Displaying an NCQA badge on our site means the facility has provided documentation of their accreditation and we have reviewed it. It does not mean we conducted the accreditation evaluation ourselves, nor does it constitute an endorsement of clinical outcomes. NCQA accreditation is granted by the National Committee for Quality Assurance — not by our directory. We display it as a factual credential, exactly as earned.
Official Source
Learn More From NCQA
NCQA maintains a public report card database where you can look up the accreditation status of health plans and organizations directly.
Visit ncqa.orgFind NCQA-Accredited Treatment Centers
Browse our directory to find facilities displaying verified NCQA accreditation. Look for the blue NCQA badge on any listing.
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