At the Intersection of Health, Health Care and Policy

Cite this article as:

Donald M. Berwick, Thomas W. Nolan and John Whittington
The Triple Aim: Care, Health, And Cost
Health Affairs, 27, no.3 (2008):759-769

doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.27.3.759

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The Triple Aim: Care, Health,

And Cost
The remaining barriers to integrated care are not technical; they are
political.
by Donald M. Berwick, Thomas W. Nolan, and John Whittington

ABSTRACT: Improving the U.S. health care system requires simultaneous pursuit of three
aims: improving the experience of care, improving the health of populations, and reducing
per capita costs of health care. Preconditions for this include the enrollment of an identi-
fied population, a commitment to universality for its members, and the existence of an or-
ganization (an “integrator”) that accepts responsibility for all three aims for that population.
The integrator’s role includes at least five components: partnership with individuals and
families, redesign of primary care, population health management, financial management,
and macro system integration. [Health Affairs 27, no. 3 (2008): 759–769; 10.1377/hlthaff
.27.3.759]

C
o n g e s t i v e h e a rt fa i lu r e (CHF) is the most common reason for ad-
mission of Medicare patients to a hospital.1 Sadly, 40 percent of Medicare
patients discharged after admission for CHF are readmitted within ninety
days, even though well-designed demonstration projects have shown for years that
that rate can be reduced by more than 80 percent with proper management of pa-
tients.2 Patients experience this reactive system as one providing poor service and
lacking memory. Caregivers experience frustration, despite their best efforts.
n U.S. health system scorecard. CHF care is not an isolated case. It is a prime
example of what goes wrong when a health care system lacks the capacity to inte-
grate its work over time and across sites of care. The recent “Scorecard” from the
Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System gives the
U.S. health care system an overall score of 66 percent, with 100 percent referring to
the top decile of known performance.3 The commission notes that even though U.S.
health care expenditures are far higher than those of other developed countries, our
results are no better. Despite spending on health care being nearly double that of the
next most costly nation, the United States ranks thirty-first among nations on life
expectancy, thirty-sixth on infant mortality, twenty-eighth on male healthy life ex-
pectancy, and twenty-ninth on female healthy life expectancy.4 As a side effect of the

Donald Berwick (dberwick1@ihi.org) is president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Healthcare
Improvement (IHI) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thomas Nolan is a senior fellow at IHI in Silver Spring,
Maryland. John Whittington is a senior fellow at IHI in Cambridge.

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cost burden, the United States is the only industrialized nation that does not guar-
antee universal health insurance to its citizens. We claim we cannot afford it.
n Care improvement efforts. Most recent efforts to improve the quality of
health care have aimed to reduce defects in the care of patients at a single site of care
in all six dimensions identified by the Institute of Medicine (IOM): safety, effective-
ness, patient-centeredness, timeliness, efficiency, and equity.5 Slow progress in each
of these is occurring, as measurements, incentives, knowledge, will, and experi-
ments come increasingly into alignment. However, the task of improving individu-
als’ care is hardly completed. In the wave of projects on “pay-for-performance” (P4P)
and public reporting, policymakers, payers, and health care leaders are still strug-
gling to make highly reliable and safe health care a norm rather than an exception.6
Moreover, too few improvement efforts address defects in care across the contin-
uum, such as those that plague patients with CHF.

Defining The “Triple Aim”

Work to improve site-specific care for individuals should expand and thrive. In
our view, however, the United States will not achieve high-value health care un-
less improvement initiatives pursue a broader system of linked goals. In the aggre-
gate, we call those goals the “Triple Aim”: improving the individual experience of
care; improving the health of populations; and reducing the per capita costs of care
for populations.
n Interdependent goals. The components of the Triple Aim are not independ-
ent of each other. Changes pursuing any one goal can affect the other two, sometimes
negatively and sometimes positively. For example, improving care for individuals
can raise costs if the improvements are associated with new, effective, but costly
technologies or drugs. Conversely, eliminating overuse or misuse of therapies or di-
agnostic tests can lead to both reduced costs and improved outcomes. The situation
is made more complex by time delays among the effects of changes. Good preventive
care may take years to yield returns in cost or population health.
n An exercise in balance. Pursuit of the Triple Aim is an exercise in balance
and will be subject to specified policy constraints, such as decisions about how
much to spend on health care or what coverage to provide and to whom. The most
important of all such constraints, we believe, should be the promise of equity; the
gain in health in one subpopulation ought not to be achieved at the expense of an-
other subpopulation. But that decision lies in the realms of ethics and policy; it is not
technically inherent in the Triple Aim.
A health system capable of continual improvement on all three aims, under
whatever constraints policy creates, looks quite different from one designed for
the first aim only. The balanced pursuit of the Triple Aim is not congruent with
the current business models of any but a tiny number of U.S. health care organiza-
tions. For most, only one, or possibly two, of the dimensions is strategic, but not
all three. Thus, we face a paradox with respect to pursuit of the Triple Aim. From

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“The Holy Grail of universal coverage may remain out of reach

unless we can reduce per capita costs.”
the viewpoint of the United States as a whole, it is essential; yet from the view-
point of individual actors responding to current market forces, pursuing the three
aims at once is not in their immediate self-interest.
Take hospitals as an example. Under current market dynamics and payment in-
centives, it is entirely rational for hospitals to try to fill beds and to expand ser-
vices even though the work of Elliott Fisher and John Wennberg strongly predicts
the net effect to be much higher cost and no higher quality.7 Most hospitals seem
to believe that they can protect profits best by protecting and increasing revenues.
Higher efficiency in local production can help, too, but systemic efficiencies that
reduce revenues or admission rates are threats to profit. The same payment dy-
namics often lead hospitals to focus only on care within their walls, viewing CHF
readmissions, for example, as indicating defects outside the hospital, not as their
responsibility to avert.
n A “tragedy of the commons.” Rational common interests and rational indi-
vidual interests are in conflict. Our failure as a nation to pursue the Triple Aim
meets the criteria for what Garrett Harden called a “tragedy of the commons.”8 As in
all tragedies of the commons, the great task in policy is not to claim that stake-
holders are acting irrationally, but rather to change what is rational for them to do.
The stakes are high. Indeed, the Holy Grail of universal coverage in the United States
may remain out of reach unless, through rational collective action overriding some
individual self-interest, we can reduce per capita costs.
n Obstacles to pursuit of the Triple Aim. The changes we would need to mobi-
lize pursuit of the Triple Aim are large, and the obstacles are daunting. Among the
biggest barriers are supply-driven demand; new technologies including many with
limited impact on outcomes; physician-centric care; little or no foreign competition
to spur domestic change, as it does in manufacturing; and too little appreciation of
system knowledge among clinicians and organizations, leading them to subopti-
mize the components of the system with which they are most familiar, at the ex-
pense of the whole.
n Promising innovations. Despite these obstacles, a handful of innovators are
starting to challenge the U.S. health care market. These disruptive innovations are
by no means yet mainstream, but the examples align surprisingly well with the
objectives of the Triple Aim. For example, innovations in primary care such as the
medical home, as well as “Minute Clinics” and other retail health care providers are
challenging the prevailing approach to primary care.9 Experiments in telecommuni-
cations are offering care that is no longer location-specific.10 One form of foreign
competition—“medical tourism”—is beginning to catch on. Also, a few hospitals,
such as Virginia Mason Medical Center, Denver Health, and ThedaCare, are learning

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to use systems knowledge to reduce costs and improve profit, such as by adapting
“lean production” to health care.11
n Measuring health care quality. In general, opacity of performance is not a
major obstacle to the Triple Aim. Many tools are in hand to construct part of a bal-
anced portfolio of measures to track the experience of a population on all three com-
ponents. At the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), for example, we have
developed and are using a balanced set of systemwide measures closely related to the
Triple Aim.12 A more complete set of system metrics would include ways to track the
experience of care in ambulatory settings, including patient engagement, continuity,
and clinical preventive practices.
n Measuring costs and health status. Measuring per capita costs is still a big
challenge; it requires that we capture all relevant expenditures, index them appro-
priately to local market circumstances, and be able to measure actual costs in a care
system whose current methods of pricing and discounting obscure them. Popula-
tion health measures would require some form of registration or sampling for de-
fined populations and would be speeded by widespread implementation of elec-
tronic health record systems. Citing one serious gap, the IOM recently concluded
that measures of both cost and care across the continuum, impeded by the fragmen-
tation of delivery itself, still need much more developmental work.

Preconditions For Pursuit Of The Triple Aim

Despite the social need and the feasibility of measurement, actual pursuit of the
Triple Aim remains the exception. What would be the preconditions for changing
that?
We suggest that three inescapable design constraints underlie effective accom-
plishment of the Triple Aim: (1) recognition of a population as the unit of concern,
(2) externally supplied policy constraints (such as a total budget limit or the re-
quirement that all subgroups be treated equitably), and (3) existence of an “inte-
grator” able to focus and coordinate services to help the population on all three
dimensions at once.
n Specifying a population of concern. A “population” need not be geographic.
What best defines a population, as we use the term, is probably the concept of enroll-
ment. (This is different from the prevailing meaning of the word enrollment in U.S.
health care today, which denotes a financial transaction, not a commitment to a
healing relationship.) A registry that tracks a defined group of people over time
would create a “population” for the purposes of the Triple Aim. Other examples of
populations are “all of the diabetics in Massachusetts,” “people in Maryland below
300 percent of poverty,” “members of Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound,”
“the citizens of a county,” or even “all of the people who say that Dr. Jones is their
doctor.” Only when the population is specified does it become, in principle, possible
to know about its experiences of care, its health status, and the per capita costs of
caring for it. Under current conditions, such registries are rare in the United States,

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especially for geographically defined populations. Creating them will require re-
search, development, and investment.
n Policy constraints. The policy constraints that shape the balance sought
among the three aims are not automatic or inherent in the idea. Rather, they derive
from the processes of decision making, politics, and social contracting relevant to
the population involved. For example, a nation or state might or might not decide
that “universal coverage” is mandatory; a community in a town meeting or an em-
ployer in negotiation with a labor union might or might not decide to spend no more
than x dollars per capita or y dollars per year on health care. Logically—that is,
mathematically—optimizing on three aims at once requires constraints on at least
two of them.
n Integrator. An “integrator” is an entity that accepts responsibility for all three
components of the Triple Aim for a specified population. Importantly, by definition,
an integrator cannot exclude members or subgroups of the population for which it is
responsible. The simplest such form, such as Kaiser Permanente, has fully integrated
financing and either full ownership of or exclusive relationships with delivery struc-
tures, and it is able to use those structures to good advantage. We believe, however,
that other models can also take on a strong integrator role, even without unified fi-
nancing or a single delivery system. That role might be within the reach of a power-
ful, visionary insurer; a large primary care group in partnership with payers; or even
a hospital, with some affiliated physician group, that seeks to be especially attractive
to payers.
In crafting care, an effective integrator, in one way or another, will link health
care organizations (as well as public health and social service organizations)
whose missions overlap across the spectrum of delivery. It will be able to recog-
nize and respond to patients’ individual care needs and preferences, to the health
needs and opportunities of the population (whether or not people seek care), and
to the total costs of care. The important function of linking organizations across
the continuum requires that the integrator be a single organization (not just a
market dynamic) that can induce coordinative behavior among health service
suppliers to work as a system for the defined population.

Functions Of An Integrator
n Involving individuals and families. Pursuit of the Triple Aim requires that the
population served become continually better informed about both the determinants
of their own health status and the benefits and limitations of individual health care
practices and procedures. An effective integrator would work persistently to change
the “more-is-better” culture through transparency, systematic education, communi-
cation, and shared decision making with patients and communities, rather than by
restricting access, shifting costs, or erecting administrative hurdles to care. Many
members of the population, especially those with chronic illnesses, will need some-
one who can work with them to establish a plan for their ongoing care, guide them

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through the technological jungle of acute care, advocate for them, and interpret.
n Redesign of primary care services and structures. We believe that any ef-
fective integrator will strengthen primary care for the population. To accomplish
this, physicians might not be the sole, or even the principal, providers. Recently, phy-
sicians and other clinicians have proposed principles for expanding the role of pri-
mary care under the title of the medical home. This expanded role includes estab-
lishing long-term relations between patients and their primary care team;
developing shared plans of care; coordinating care, including subspecialists and hos-
pitals; and providing innovative access to services through improved scheduling,
connection to community resources, and new means of communication among indi-
viduals, families, and the primary care team facilitated by a patient-controlled per-
sonalized health record. The integrator would assume responsibility for building
the capability and infrastructure to enable primary care practices to function in this
expanded role.
n Population health management. The integrator would be responsible for
deploying resources to the population, or for specifying to others how resources
should be deployed. Segmentation of the population, perhaps according to health
status, level of support from family or others, and socioeconomic status, will facili-
tate efficient and equitable resource allocation.13 The growing availability of high-
quality health information on the Internet will help all segments manage their own
care and understand options for treatment.
Today’s individual health care processes are designed to respond to the acute
needs of individual patients, rather than to anticipate and shape patterns of care
for important subgroups. An integrator would act differently, assigning much
more value and many more resources, for example, to the monitoring and intercep-
tion of early signs of deterioration among the 100 CHF patients in a doctor’s panel
or the 1,000 CHF patients who used the hospital last year.
Famously, the “actual” causes of mortality in the United States lie in behavior
that the individual health care system addresses unreliably or not at all, such as
smoking, violence, physical inactivity, poor nutrition, and unsafe choices.14 An in-
tegrator would increase preventive efforts. An integrator would also encourage
and cooperate with governmental policies, agencies, and programs to discourage
smoking, combat obesity, provide alternatives to violence and substance abuse,
and address community determinants of mental health problems.
n Financial management system. The broken financing system of the present
mirrors the fragmented care system. An effective integrator would assure that pay-
ment and resource allocation support the Triple Aim. An important first step for a
systems approach to cost control would be defining, measuring, and making trans-
parent the per capita cost of care for a defined population. For example, companies
could begin to show on employees’ paychecks the amount of money spent per em-
ployee by the company to provide health insurance. The Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services (CMS) could provide regions with cost information per benefi-

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ciary to allow comparisons of costs and inflation across the country.

A mainstay of reduction and control of per capita costs would be yearly initia-
tives to reduce waste in all of its forms, especially procedures, tests, and visits that
represent rework, errors, unscientific care, or otherwise valueless services. George
Isham, medical director of HealthPartners in Minneapolis, has called for a project
to identify the ten most common forms of waste in each medical specialty.15 Any
integrator collaborating on improvement of value with its suppliers of specialty
care would be very interested in Isham’s list. An indication of progress on the Tri-
ple Aim would be doctors’ leading and energetically participating in such efforts.
Perhaps the most powerful needed change is to disrupt the dynamics of supply-
driven care and instead to match supply better to underlying needs. An integrator
would approach new technologies and capital investments with skepticism and
require that a strong burden of proof of value lie with the proponent. Operating
budgets would encourage thinking across boundaries. An integrator would ask,
“Might two additional home outreach nurses be better for the Triple Aim than an-
other cardiologist?” Capital budgets would be informed by the insights of Fisher
and Wennberg, and good integrators would encourage through incentives—and,
if needed, regulations—strict limits on the growth of facilities.
The hallmarks of proper financial management in a system pursuing the Triple
Aim, we suspect, are government policies, purchasing contracts, or market mech-
anisms that lead to a cap on total spending, with strictly limited year-on-year
growth targets.
n System integration at the macro level. A conscientious integrator would as-
pire to produce or contract for individual care and population-based interventions
that are evidence-based and highly reliable. To achieve that, all in the system of care
would need access to up-to-date medical knowledge, standardized definitions of
quality and cost, and evidence and measurement collected and distributed by a thor-
oughly trustworthy body. In effect, patients, caregivers, organizations, and manag-
ers would know the “state of the system” with respect to its reliability, adherence to
evidence, cost, and progress in improvement.
In most cases, the integrator would not be a direct provider of all necessary ser-
vices. Instead, it would need to commission some services from suppliers through
business relationships consciously designed to facilitate pursuit of the Triple Aim.
Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg have called for a redefinition of competi-
tion in health care.16 They assert that value is added by care that produces the best
outcomes at the lowest cost over time. An integrator, following their logic, might
contract with a multifunctional group of providers to serve a specific subpopula-
tion.

Precedents And Possibilities

The Triple Aim is far from a totally new idea. As one would expect, organiza-
tions and other stakeholders in a variety of countries that begin with a population

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in mind tend to want to achieve all three goals at once. Among these stakeholders
are (1) government-sponsored or -owned health care systems that have legally
chartered duties to defined populations and that own facilities, employ clinicians,
and provide and manage clinical services (in the United States, these include the
Veterans Health Administration, the Indian Health Service, and the Military
Health Command); (2) classical staff- and group-model health maintenance orga-
nizations (HMOs), such as Kaiser Permanente, HealthPartners, and Group Health
Cooperative of Puget Sound, which combine insurance and care delivery func-
tions (although usually not public health systems) for enrolled populations; and
(3) national and other governmental health care systems that aggregate tax reve-
nues into global budgets and, through employment, ownership, and contracting,
ensure care for populations. Examples include the National Health Service (NHS)
in the United Kingdom and health care in Sweden, where counties act as integra-
tors, using general tax revenues to fund the comprehensive care systems that
county-level executives organize and improve for their entire population.17
In the United States, a few additional cases of Triple Aim–oriented organiza-
tions have emerged. Some employers, fed up with out-of-control costs but unwill-
ing to give up trying to ensure proper care for their employees, have started their
own care systems, reminiscent of the roots of Kaiser Permanente. For example,
QuadGraphics, a large U.S. publishing company, started QuadMed, a wholly
owned subsidiary that provides care to QuadGraphics employees using a highly
innovative model of strong primary care as the mainstay.18
Occasional entrepreneurial hospital-based systems, often with very high mar-
ket share and strong community roots, such as Intermountain Health Care,
Geisinger Health System, Bellin Health System, and (for care of the underserved)
Denver Health, try to knit together components of the care system in virtual ag-
gregates through technical support and innovative contracts. The numerous re-
cent state-level initiatives for universal health insurance coverage inevitably face
the Triple Aim as the only route to affordability; Massachusetts, as one example,
has established a Quality and Cost Council to try to determine how to keep all
three aims in a single field of vision.19
n HMOs as integrators. So what happened to HMOs? As conceived by their
greatest champion, Paul Ellwood, HMOs were, or were intended to be, integrators
exactly as we propose, in pursuit of the Triple Aim.20 On closer inspection, the HMO
movement was eventually defined by its organizational structure rather than its
aims and performance. The experience of people enrolled in HMOs was not suffi-
ciently improved to overcome the restriction of choice of providers or the perceived
barriers to access to specialists that became part of the HMO model. Because they
restricted care, HMOs were vulnerable to competitive retaliation by indemnity in-
surers and others, which began offering products called “HMO” or “managed care”
that merely managed money, not care. Furthermore, proponents of HMOs might
have overestimated the cost-saving potential of proper preventive care, instead of

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“Innovations in payment design encourage integrated behavior

without the managerial superstructure of an HMO.”
viewing population health status and per capita cost control as separate aims.21 Fi-
nally, HMOs were competing for doctors and acute care suppliers in an environment
in which these providers were in control of demand and thus revenue. The HMO
was not an attractive business alternative for them.
n Encouraging signs for integrated care. Even with the similarity between an
HMO and our view of the integrator, we are encouraged in large measure because
the possibilities of integrated care have so thoroughly changed with the advent of
electronic support systems and the possibilities for virtual integration and instant
communication that were unimaginable when HMOs were first described. Fisher’s
recent proposals for virtual integration of care through extended medical staffs, for
example, represent innovations that draw on some of the principles of classical
HMOs, but with entirely new processes and relationships at their core.22 Innova-
tions in payment design, such as bundled payment experiments by the CMS for
chronic disease management and Harold Luft’s conceptualization of case rates for
local microsystems, offer interesting approaches to encouraging integrated behavior
without the managerial superstructure of an HMO.23
n What it takes to progress toward integrated care. From the (we hope tem-
porary) failure of the best features of the HMO concept we take the lesson not that
all integrated care is destined to fail, but rather that pursuit of the Triple Aim threat-
ens the U.S. status quo health care system. The current behavior, destructive of the
Triple Aim and inimical to the best aspects of sound, managed care, is a predictable,
indeed inevitable, consequence of the current rules. If we want different behavior,
we will need new financing and competitive dynamics. What new financing or dy-
namics, different from today’s, would lead rational hospitals to try to reduce re-
admissions dramatically for CHF?
If we could ever find the political nerve, we strongly suspect that financing and
competitive dynamics such as the following, purveyed by governments and pay-
ers, would accelerate interest in the Triple Aim and progress toward it: (1) global
budget caps on total health care spending for designated populations, (2) mea-
surement of and fixed accountability for the health status and health needs of des-
ignated populations, (3) improved standardized measures of care and per capita
costs across sites and through time that are transparent, (4) changes in payment
such that the financial gains from reduction of per capita costs are shared among
those who pay for care and those who can and should invest in further improve-
ments, and (5) changes in professional education accreditation to ensure that cli-
nicians are capable of changing and improving their processes of care. With some
risk, we note that the simplest way to establish many of these environmental con-
ditions is a single-payer system, hiring integrators with prospective, global bud-

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gets to take care of the health needs of a defined population, without permission
to exclude any member of the population.

Indicators Of Progress
In our lighter moments, we have tried to imagine the most elegant possible “Tri-
ple Aim Test,” asking, “How would we know at first glance that the care for a pop-
ulation is actually making progress on the Triple Aim?” Our proposed test has only
three items. First, hospitals involved in the Triple Aim would be trying to be emp-
tier, not fuller. They would celebrate as success that the hospital is less and less of-
ten needed by the population. Second, Fisher and Wennberg would be happier.
They would observe that the dynamics of supply-driven care are no longer strong
and that patients pull resources, rather than vice versa. And third, patients would
say of those who try to maintain and restore their health: “They remember me.”
They would recognize that the health care system is mindful of their needs, wants,
and opportunities for health even when they themselves forget. Health care would
also be mindful that people have excellent uses for their wealth other than paying
for care they do not need or for illnesses they could have avoided.

W
h e t h e r o r n o t t h e t r i p l e a i m is within reach for the United
States has become less and less a question of technical barriers. From
experiments in the United States and from examples of other coun-
tries, it is now possible to describe feasible, evidence-based care system designs
that achieve gains on all three aims at once: care, health, and cost. The remaining
barriers are not technical; they are political. The superiority of the possible end
state is no longer scientifically debatable. The pain of the transition state—the
disruption of institutions, forms, habits, beliefs, and income streams in the status
quo—is what denies us, so far, the enormous gains on components of the Triple
Aim that integrated care could offer.

The authors are grateful for the contributions of Jane Roessner, Frank Davidoff, Val Weber, Samantha Henderson,
and Maureen Bisognano.

NOTES
1. H.M. Krumholz et al., ”Readmission after Hospitalization for Congestive Heart Failure among Medicare
Beneficiaries,” Archives of Internal Medicine 157, no. 1 (1997): 99–104.
2. G.C. Fonarow et al., “Impact of a Comprehensive Heart Failure Management Program on Hospital Read-
mission and Functional Status of Patients with Advanced Heart Failure,” Journal of the American College of
Cardiology 30, no. 3 (1997): 725–732.
3. J.C. Cantor et al., “Aiming Higher: Results from a State Scorecard on Health System Performance” (New
York: Commonwealth Fund, June 2007); and Commission on a High Performance Health System, “Why
Not the Best? Results from a National Scorecard on U.S. Health System Performance” (New York: Com-
monwealth Fund, September 2006).
4. World Health Organization, “World Health Statistics 2006,” http://www.who.int/whosis/whostat2006/
en (accessed 28 June 2007).
5. Institute of Medicine, Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the Twenty-first Century (Washington:
National Academies Press, 2001).

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