The Institute of Medicine released Patient Safety: Achieving a New Standard for Care, a report that describes a detailed plan to facilitate the development of data standards applicable to the collection, coding, and classification of patient safety information.

This report addresses key areas related to the establishment of a national health information infrastructure, including:

• a process for the ongoing promulgation of data standards;
• the status of current standards-setting activities in health data interchange, terminologies, and medical knowledge representation; as well as
• the need for comprehensive patient safety programs in health care organizations.

Recommendations are made for an applied research agenda on patient safety.