Congress, through the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 (Section 107(c)), mandated the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to sponsor the Institute of Medicine to carry out a study:

• To develop a fuller understanding of drug safety and quality issues through the conduct of an evidence-based review of the literature, case studies and analysis. This review will consider the nature and causes of medication errors; their impact on patients; and the differences in causation, impact and prevention across multiple dimensions of health care delivery including patient populations, care settings, clinicians, and institutional cultures.

• If possible, to develop estimates of the incidence, severity and costs of medication errors that can be useful in prioritizing resources for national quality improvement efforts and influencing national health care policy.

• To evaluate alternative approaches to reducing medication errors in terms of their efficacy, cost-effectiveness, appropriateness in different settings and circumstances, feasibility, institutional barriers to implementation, associated risk, and quality of evidence supporting the approach.

• To provide guidance to consumers, providers, payers, and other key stakeholders on high-priority strategies to achieve both short-term and long-term drug safety goals, to elucidate the goals and expected results of such initiatives and support the business case for them, and to identify critical success factors and key levers for achieving success.

• To assess opportunities and key impediments to broad nationwide implementation of medication error reductions, and to provide guidance to policy-makers and government agencies in promoting a national agenda for medication error reduction.

• To develop an applied research agenda to evaluate the health and cost impacts of alternative interventions, and to assess collaborative public and private strategies for implementing the research agenda through the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and other government agencies.