Making drugs is messy. Take heparin. You raise pigs and then slaughter them. You isolate the pig intestines and cook them. Then you scrape the intestinal insides, dry them, and get them to a factory to undergo more processing (Harris, 2008).

One early morning in September 1982, a 12-year-old girl awoke in her home in the outskirts of Chicago with moderate cold symptoms. Her loving parents prepared a tall glass of water and one Extra Strength Tylenol® capsule for her to take before sending her back to bed. A few hours later, Mr. and Mrs. Kellerman awoke to find their daughter Mary critically ill on the bathroom floor. Her parents rushed her to the hospital, and she died a short time later.

While not spread evenly, our national investment into improving the quality of care has begun to pay dividends. So far, the payback has been modest: Quality inched upward by 2.3% between 1994 and 2005, according to a 2007 national report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

In late October, I attended three conferences: Health 2.0, the Center for Connected Health symposium, and the annual congress of the Center for the Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technologies. Although these organizations have somewhat different audiences (Health 2.0 is more a community than organization), their conferences share a focus on technology, especially applications and devices that give patients new ways to manage their health and medical care.

In the United States, vaccine-preventable diseases cost in excess of $10 billion annually. Pneumococcal disease and influenza combined were the 8th leading cause of death in 2004 (Kung, et al., 2008).

Unknown to most Americans, the United States provides universal health coverage to its more than 305 million citizens and legal residents.

For as long as healthcare professionals have worked to improve patient safety, they have debated which criteria are appropriate for evaluating improvement initiatives and what evidence is required before programs are widely implemented.

Increasingly, healthcare consumers engage with clinicians and administrators in discussions about improving the safety and quality of healthcare.

Jackson Memorial Hospital is a 1,600-bed tertiary care facility in Miami, Florida, and serves as the primary teaching hospital for the University of Miami — Miller School of Medicine.

Healthcare consumers are increasingly aware of medical error and publicly reported quality measures.