You can't leap a chasm in two jumps: The institute of medicine health care quality report

The American health system is in need of fundamental change.It is failing both clinicians and patients, and their frustration levels have never been higher . . . . 1 [p.1] Exhaustive research now shows that the system is plagued with errors, over-utilization, and under-utilization.These problems are not the result of a failure of goodwill, knowledge, effort, or resources devoted to healthcare-they stem from fundamental shortcomings in the way the system is organized. 1[p.25-26] The current system will not work to achieve the enormous changes that are needed. 1[p.95] Correction of the problems [in the system] calls for fundamental changes in the organization, delivery and financing of the US health system. 1 [p.24] With language that could easily have been lifted from a radical manifesto for national health reform, 2 the prestigious Institute of Medicine (IOM) Committee on Quality of Health Care in America has issued a scathing indictment of the US health care system.According to the IOM Committee, the magnitude of the disparity between "the health care we have [and] the care we could have . . . is a not just a gap, but a chasm" 1 (p.1).Hence the provocative title of the Committee's second and final report, Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century.This new publication, released a year after the Committee's influential first report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, 3 aims, like its predecessor, to have a major impact on public opinion and health policy.While much of the publicity generated by To Err is Human centered around its spotlighting of a decade-old finding that medical errors caused as many as 98,000 deaths each