Patient Safety beyond the Hospital

The vast majority of health care is delivered in ambulatory settings, yet we are only just beginning to understand the safety risks that exist outside of hospital walls. There are 900 million visits to physicians' offices in the United States each year, as compared with 35 million hospital discharges,1 and spending on outpatient care is the fastest growing segment of health care spending.2 Yet most patient-safety research and safety-improvement work have been done in inpatient settings; indeed, a search of the Patient Safety Network Web site of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality shows that since 2005 only about . . .