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Quality Of Care

Bridging The Quality Gap

Bridging the quality gap is a complex undertaking. And complexity breeds error. A key issue for policymakers, providers, and consumers is how to reduce medical errors and other quality problems, which in the United States cause some 98,000 deaths each year, thousands of injuries, and untold suffering. What can be done to make health care safer and more effective? How can the United States revamp its trillion-dollar system, which has the capacity to produce the best health care in the world but so often fails to do so? Can we find a way to sustain quality and patient safety as front-and-center issues on the U.S. policy agenda?

The papers in this section explore what can be done now to make quality count. First, John Ayanian, of Harvard University, and Thomas Quinn, of the U.K. Department of Health, highlight lessons learned from efforts to improve quality of care for coronary heart disease in the United States and England. Next, Elise Becher and Mark Chassin, of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, present a multifaceted strategy to eliminate barriers and effect system change. And last, RAND’s Elizabeth McGlynn and Robert Brook offer their analysis of the quality problem and steps that they believe can have immediate, positive results.

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