Activity

The Quality of Health Care in America

Type:

Consensus Study

Topic(s):

Health Services, Coverage, and Access, Quality and Patient Safety, Public Health

Board(s):

Board on Health Care Services

Activity Description

In 1996, the Institute of Medicine launched a concerted, ongoing effort focused on assessing and improving the nation's quality of care.

The Committee on Quality of Health Care in America laid out a vision for how the health care system and related policy environment must be radically transformed in order to close the chasm between what we know to be good quality care and what actually exists in practice.  The reports released -- To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System (1999) and Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century (2001) --stress that reform around the margins is inadequate to address system ills.