An Equity Agenda for the Field of Health Care Quality Improvement

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the publication of To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System (IOM, 2000) and Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century (IOM, 2001), the National Academy of Medicine convened the leaders of seven prominent U.S. health care quality organizations to discuss and author a paper identifying the most important priorities for the health care quality movement in the next 20 years. The authors identified equity as the area of most urgent and cross-cutting concern for the field. This paper summarizes the authors’ conclusions about key barriers and strategies to advancing equity in health care quality.