Health Care Information System

Every day, tens if not hundreds of thousands of errors occur in the health care system. Some can cause disastrous effects, while others--the "near misses"--slip by almost unnoticed. In recent years, patient safety reporting systems have proliferated in health care, and many hospitals now routinely capture information on "near misses" as well as disasters. However, the utility of these reporting systems is limited. The data they collect is neither complete nor standardized, and reporting is cumbersome, costly, and sporadic at best. Improving patient safety will require much more than information systems, even if they are comprehensive and well functioning, for reporting and analyzing errors. An enhanced care delivery system must be built, one that can prevent errors from occurring in the first place. To do this, the health care industry must simultaneously set up an easy and streamlined way for health care professionals to acquire and share information related to error prevention and quality improvement. Building on the revolutionary Institute of Medicine reports "To Err is Human and "Crossing the Quality Chasm, Patient Safety puts forward a road map for the development and adoption of key health care data standards to support both information exchange and the reporting and analysis of patient safety data.

Second in a series of publications from the Institute of Medicine's Quality of Health Care in America project Today's health care providers have more research findings and more technology available to them than ever before. Yet recent reports have raised serious doubts about the quality of health care in America. Crossing the Quality Chasm makes an urgent call for fundamental change to close the quality gap. This book recommends a sweeping redesign of the American health care system and provides overarching principles for specific direction for policymakers, health care leaders, clinicians, regulators, purchasers, and others. In this comprehensive volume the committee offers: -- A set of performance expectations for the 21st century health care system. -- A set of 10 new rules to guide patient-clinician relationships. -- A suggested organizing framework to better align the incentives inherent in payment and accountability with improvements in quality. -- Key steps to promote evidence-based practice and strengthen clinical information systems. Analyzing health care organizations as complex systems, Crossing the Quality Chasm also documents the causes of the quality gap, identifies current practices that impede quality care, and explores how systems approaches can be used to implement change.