quality defects: overuse, underuse, and misuse

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A User's Manual For The IOM's 'Quality Chasm' Report

Patients' experiences should be the fundamental source of the definition of

" quality. "

by M. Berwick

PROLOGUE: The Institute of Medicine (IOM), one of the three bodies that make

up the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, has a distinguished history of

publishing weighty reports on important subjects that gather more dust on

shelves then they often deserve. One such recent IOM report, Crossing the

Quality Chasm, is gathering little dust, but penetrating it is a challenge.

It calls for nothing less than a redesign of the U.S. health care system.

" However, from the start the committee always knew that patient safety was

only one of several important quality problems at hand. The Roundtable had

provided a helpful nosology* of such problems, contributing the labels

" overuse, " " underuse, " and " misuse " as now-familiar classifications of

quality defects. "

.. nosology - A branch of medicine that deals with classification of disease.

Full text: http://bit.ly/bTZGZe

All the best,

~ Karl