OSLO, April 1 (Reuters) - Det Norske Veritas (DNV), a 144-year-old Norwegian company known as one of the world's biggest ship classifiers, aims to grab a slice of the growing market for accreditation of U.S. hospitals, it said on Tuesday.

Though classifying vessels remains the cornerstone of its business, DNV has branched into many areas of risk management and certification for activities from offshore oil drilling to lottery administration.

In the healthcare business, it certifies hospitals' quality management systems in several countries and works with the UK's National Health Service to provide risk assessment, standards development and training.

Foundation-owned DNV said in a statement it applied to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to become an authorised classifier of U.S. hospitals.

Approval from the CMS, an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, is crucial because they need a CMS-approved accreditation to qualifying for reimbursements under Medicare and Medicaid which are 40 percent of all patient claims.

"If approved, DNV stands to become the first new option for hospital accreditation in over 40 years," DNV said.

"We believe there is an expressed need for an alternative, and we think we can provide this alternative, and the competition will be good for things," Yehuda Dror, president of DNV Healthcare, told Reuters by phone from Houston.

U.S. hospital accreditation is dominated by the not-for-profit Joint Commission with annual revenues of around $140 million. The American Osteopathic Asssociation is a smaller CMS-approved provider.

DNV would be just the third in the business where the market consists of 6,000 U.S. hospitals, DNV said.

"Healthcare spending is over two trillion dollars a year, yet preventable medical errors are still on the rise," Dror said in the statement. "DNV's market for hospital accreditation is naturally the United States."

But if DNV gets recognised by the CMS as an accreditor, the company will also look to expand outside the United States by providing accreditation for hospitals in the growing healthcare tourism industry, Dror said.

"Healthcare tourism is a phenomenon that we begin to see taking hold in a few countries, and we will focus on those countries," he said, listing India, Brazil, Thailand, the Czech Republic and Poland as possible markets for the service.

DNV said it could offer U.S. healthcare organisations a programme combining ISO 9001 quality management with Medicare's requirements for participation.

(Reporting by John Acher; editing by Elaine Hardcastle)

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