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Tracy Hampton, PhD

JAMA. 2006;295:264.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Although the United States lays claim to state-of-the-art medical innovations and top-quality clinical research, the US government is the first to admit that the country needs to improve its health care delivery system. Therefore, at the request of Congress, a committee at the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies has proposed a strategy for developing universally accepted performance measurements for improving health care across the nation. Performance measurements are benchmarks by which clinicians and health care organizations can determine their success in delivering care—for example, routine blood and urine tests for patients with diabetes.

The committee's report, Performance Measurement: Accelerating Improvement (http://books.nap.edu/catalog/11517.html), is the first in a series that will focus on the redesign of health insurance in the United States.

"Americans today demand more from our health care system," said committee chair Steven Schroeder, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco. "The . . . [Full Text of this Article]