Improving Patient Safety — Five Years after the IOM Report

A 1999 report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) featured a now-familiar statistic: 44,000 to 98,000 people die in hospitals each year because of preventable medical errors, making hospital-based errors alone the eighth leading cause of death in the United States, ahead of breast cancer, AIDS, and motor vehicle accidents. Regardless of debate about these estimates, they remain the standard for describing the scope of the nation's problem with medical errors.(Figure)When the report, titled To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, was released, these numbers caught the public's attention as few other health policy issues . . .