Two years later, IOM followed up its safety push with “Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century.” The sequel study laid out focus areas and guidelines to start reducing the spate of medical mistakes that “To Err Is Human” lay bare.

“When the IOM report came out, it gave us a focus and a language that we didn’t have before,” says Dr. Wachter, who served as president of SHM’s Board of Directors and to this day lectures at SHM annual meetings. “But I think the general sensibility that hospitalists are about improving quality and safety and patients’ experience and efficiency—I think that was baked in from the start.”

Dr. Wachter and other early leaders pushed the field to become involved in systems-improvement work. This turned out to be prophetic in December 1999, when patient safety zoomed to the national forefront with the publication of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report “To Err Is Human.” Its conclusions, by now, are well-known. It showed between 44,000 and 98,000 people a year die from preventable medical errors, the equivalent of a jumbo jet a day crashing. The impact was profound, and safety initiatives became a focal point of hospitals.