On Nov. 29, 1999, the “To Err is Human” report was published by the Institute of Medicine, a division of the National Academies of Sciences, that asserted the problem is not bad people in health care–it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer.

The report laid out a comprehensive strategy by which government, health care providers, industry, and consumers can reduce preventable medical errors. Concluding that the know-how already exists to prevent many of these mistakes. Experts estimated that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. The report sets a minimum goal a 50 percent reduction in errors by 2005.

The Institute of Medicine was founded in 1970 under the charter of the National Academy of Sciences to address the concerns of medicine and healthcare. In 2015, The the Institute of Medicine was renamed the National Academy of Medicine.