Guest Author Donald Text Bryant on the Institute of Medicine’s “Best Care at Lower Cost” Report

In 2001 the Institute of Medicine published Crossing the Quality Chasm, a report on the quality of healthcare in the United States and on the needless deaths that occurred in the healthcare system. The report listed ways to overcome the inadequacies in the system. The report was widely quoted and led to many quality improvement efforts at healthcare sites across the United States.

Now, eleven years after the issue of Crossing the Quality Chasm, the IOM has issued another report on the state of healthcare in the U.S.: Best Care at Lower Cost. It draws upon many of the successes in delivering better care at a lower cost in order to foster more widespread changes that will improve care while saving a great deal of money. Since this is the focus of the work that I do, I will take this issue of “Making Good Healthcare Better” to highlight some of the recommendations from the report. Before I do that, let me present a few quotes from a September 7, 2012 Associated Press article—“Healthcare System Wastes $750B a Year” in its review of the report:

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