Six Aims for Quality Transformation of Healthcare Delivery

The Institute of Medicine (IOM), established in 1970 under the charter of the National Academy of Sciences, serves as adviser to the nation to improve the health of all Americans. The Institute provides independent, objective, evidence-based advice to policymakers, health professionals, the private sector and the public.
In 2001, the IOM released a landmark report, Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century.The report expounded on the needed focus related to specific quality issues and accompanying changes in the U.S. healthcare delivery system that are required. Specifically, the report indicated that all "healthcare organizations...should adopt as their explicit purpose to continually reduce the burden of illness, injury and disability and to improve the health and functioning of the people of the United States".
To close the widening quality chasm in the U.S. healthcare delivery system, the IOM report recommended that healthcare should focus on these six aims: patient safety, effectiveness, patient-centeredness, timeliness, efficiency and equitability. The report notes that focusing on these six aims will begin a transformation in our current national healthcare delivery system. This transformation will require a systematic re-design of current healthcare systems and processes of care.
I am in complete agreement with this report. I have written about the report in my books. In fact, you might say that these six aims of transformation have become my guiding force for clinical activity at Nature Coast Regional Health System. What all the stakeholders in our national healthcare system need to realize is that this report is applicable at all levels of patient care; from the individual practitioner to the largest of all the healthcare delivery systems in this country.It transcends all the local, state, regional and national healthcare bureaucracies because it is all about the patient. If I can adopt the recommendations of this report in a small rural health system, others in a similar situation should be able to do the same. It needs to become a grass roots effort at the smallest level to rise up and create the groundswell for national transformation. I am assuming that President Obama's advisers have read this report. If not, it needs to be brought out again into the mainstream media to shock the consciousness of all Americans.
My next blog will describe the report's new, more beneficial approach to providing patient care.
Dr. Dale