In 1999 a landmark report was published by the Institute of Medicine which estimated that up to 98,000 deaths occur every year in U.S. hospitals as a result of medical errors. This report helped to focus attention on the challenge of creating care processes that not only guard against mistakes, but also ensure that patients receive care based on the latest medical evidence—a concept better known as “evidence-based medicine.”

Five years ago at Crozer-Keystone Health System, we decided to establish our own mechanism for ensuring that we remain up-to-date on the latest medical evidence and use it to guide the care we provide. Our Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) program has become the centerpiece of our efforts to improve processes, ensure quality, and, perhaps most importantly, build a culture of communication among all of our clinicians and staff. 

Throughout these EBM web pages, you will read about the results of our Evidence Based Medicine projects to date, and you will see how we have been able to expand beyond our original projects into new areas.

Thanks to the progress we have made in EBM over the past five years, we are well-positioned to expand our efforts into new areas and to devise new and better ways to diffuse information. We also are exceptionally well-positioned to operate in an environment where hospitals and healthcare systems are being held accountable for quality. In April 2005, for example, the Department of Health and Human Services launched a consumer-oriented Web site, www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov, which currently offers information from over 4,200 hospitals in the U.S. that voluntarily report on the quality of care they provide. Already, the public can compare the performance of hospitals in Delaware County to that of the top ten percent in the nation, the national average, the state average, and directly to other local hospitals in treating certain conditions.