Quality and Safety in Health Care, Part II: Three Early Reports on Quality

Abstract

The 1990 Institute of Medicine report Medicare: A Strategy for Quality Assurance offered a definition of quality in health care and recommendations on how to achieve it. The forces for change would include different activities by the federal government, informed consumers, professionalism, and private initiatives. Eight years later, the National Roundtable report Statement on Quality of Care indicated that there were major problems of underuse, overuse, and misuse of health care services. In the same year, the President's Advisory Commission report Quality First: Better Health Care for All Americans discussed major problems with health care and proposed many initiatives to correct them, and also recommended a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities for the patients.