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This report from the committee on the Quality of Health Care in America makes an urgent call for fundamental change to close the quality gap, recommends a redesign of the American health care system, and provides overarching principles for specific direction for policymakers, health care leaders, clinicians, regulators, purchasers, and others.

It offers a set of performance expectations for the 21st century health care system, a set of 10 new rules to guide patient-clinician relationships, a suggested organizing framework to better align incentives inherent in payment and accountability with improvement in quality, and key steps to promote evidence-based practice and strengthen clinical information systems.

Analyzing health care organizations as complex systems, this report also documents the causes of the quality gap, identifies current practices that impede quality care, and explores how systems approaches can be used to implement change.

Copyright 2001 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.