The U.S. health care industry has neglected engineering strategies and technologies that have revolutionized quality, productivity, and performance in many other industries, says a new report from the National Academies' National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine. This "collective inattention" has contributed to serious consequences in health care -- nearly 100,000 preventable deaths per year, outdated procedures, about a half-trillion dollars wasted annually through inefficiency, costs rising at roughly three times the rate of inflation, and 43 million people uninsured. Health care professionals and engineers should work more closely together to address these challenges, said the committee that wrote the report.

"The health care sector is deeply mired in crises related to safety, quality, cost, and access that pose serious threats to the health and welfare of many Americans," said Jerome H. Grossman, committee co-chair and senior fellow and director of the Health Care Delivery Policy Program, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. "Unfortunately, the health care system has been very slow to embrace engineering tools and clinical information technologies that could transform it from an underperforming conglomerate of independent entities into a high-performance system."

"Systems-engineering tools," developed for the design, analysis, and control of complex systems, have been used by many industries to improve the safety and quality of products and services and to lower production costs. These same tools, in certain circumstances, have been shown to improve the quality and efficiency of health care. If adapted and widely adopted, they could help deliver care that is safe, effective, timely, efficient, equitable, and patient-centered -- the six "quality aims" envisioned in a landmark report by the Institute of Medicine, Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century -- the report says.