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Arch Intern Med. 2000;160:3189.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

THE RECENT Institute of Medicine report entitled "To Err Is Human" represents an unmistakable call for practitioners in all settings to identify strategies and action plans to improve health care quality by eliminating error. Patient safety has finally been driven to the top of the national health care agenda in part owing to mortality figure estimates that range from 44,000 to 98,000 hospital deaths each year from medical errors. Even more alarming than this high figure is that estimates do not include figures from ambulatory patient care settings and nursing homes.

In 1995, Jeffery Johnson and I published research in the ARCHIVES¹ that sought to determine the costs of preventable drug-related morbidity and mortality in the ambulatory setting. At that time, policy makers and health care leaders were only beginning to recognize that there were errors in the health care system and that they had implications on the costs to . . . [Full Text of this Article]