An analysis of patient safety in healthcare reveals a multitude of challenges facing providers and patients. A new commitment to providing safe, quality health care to patients is an essential part of reforming America's health care system. But to be effective, a new health care discipline (i.e., patient safety) needed to be established that would emphasize the reporting, analysis, and prevention of medical errors leading to adverse health care events. As I analyzed this growing issue in healthcare, I discovered that measuring and improving patient safety is complicated by many factors. We'll look at a few of them in hopes of better understanding the issues that are holding the healthcare industry back from solving this problem. First, it is extremely difficult to gather sufficient data to assess whether routine reporting of medical errors and patient safety events is occurring. Second, health care providers are widely concerned that their participation in any formal analysis of medical errors or patient care processes could be used against them in court or damage their professional reputation. Third, it is extremely difficult to aggregate and share critical confidential data between health care institutions and interstate lines. But these obstacles did not appear a year or two ago. Adverse incidents caused by providers have been increasingly problematic for more than a decade. So, to understand how we got to this point, let's take a look back. In 1999, a comprehensive study of the United States health care system was conducted by the Committee on Health Care Quality in America of the Institute of Medicine (IOM). They concluded that "it is not acceptable that patients...... middle of paper ......l and national leaders are aware of the importance of this crucial issue which will improve safety and peace of mind for all patients during what many consider the most vulnerable time of their lives. References Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (November 2009). and Implementation. Chicago: American Hospital Association. To Err is Human: Building A SaferHealth System. /NationalPatientSafetyGoals.Journal of Empirical Legal StudiesVolume 4, Number 4, 835-860, December 2007.