Status of quality initiatives: one year after the Institute of Medicine's report.

Over the past several years there has been an increasing public interest in the quality of health care provided by professionals, institutions and health plans. In the spring of 1998, the President's Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry issued its final report, Quality First: Better Health Care for All Americans. It identified four areas of needed improvement in health care quality--errors in health services, the underuse of services, the overuse of services, and variation in the use of services.