The gap between evidence and practice

Despite the urgent call to action made by the Institute of Medicine's (IOM's) Crossing the Quality Chasm report in 2001, several fundamental issues in health care remain largely unaddressed. Although a number of organizations have addressed many of the system-level factors cited in the report, we have much to learn about practice and patient factors that affect clinical outcomes. Now we have new opportunities to further improve health care by learning from the data available in electronic health record databases and, perhaps more importantly, to better understand the human behavior of caregivers and patients necessary to improve health care quality.