Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century

The committee on the Quality of Health Care in America released this report on March 1, 2001. It followed the 1999 report, To Err is Human

To Err is Human

To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System is a report issued in November 1999 by the U.S. Institute of Medicine that may have resulted in increased awareness of U.S. medical errors. The push for patient safety that followed its release continues...

: Building a Safer Health System, which brought to light the human toll and financial cost of medical error

Medical error

A medical error may be defined as a preventable adverse effect of care, whether or not it is evident or harmful to the patient. This might include an inaccurate or incomplete diagnosis or treatment of a disease, injury, syndrome, behavior, infection, or other ailment.-Definitions:As a general...

. These two documents were instrumental in raising patient safety

Patient safety

Patient safety is a new healthcare discipline that emphasizes the reporting, analysis, and prevention of medical error that often leads to adverse healthcare events. The frequency and magnitude of avoidable adverse patient events was not well known until the 1990s, when multiple countries reported...

to a major concern in health care and among policymakers.

This report urgently calls for change to the health care system processes to improve the level of quality. It analyzes this dilemma, and explores potential ways in which change could be implemented in the health care system.