Pursuing Perfection®, our national program to pioneer how provider organizations can successfully reinvent their major care processes, is directed by Donald M. Berwick, M.D., of Boston’s Institute for Healthcare Improvement. After only two years, sample results include a medical center in New Jersey reducing its adverse drug events by 75 percent; a public care health system in Boston cutting in half the number of emergency department visits for children with implemented asthma action plans; and a medical center in South Carolina driving down its mortality rates for acute myocardial infarction to less than half the national average.(19)

The Nurse-Family Partnership at the University of Colorado’s National Center for Children, Families and Communities shows communities across the country how to set up a home nurse visitation program for low-income mothers and their children. Long-term trials by Director David Olds, Ph.D., and his staff show that families in the program benefit from remarkable reductions in child abuse and neglect and in mothers’ use of alcohol and other drugs, plus lower rates of arrests and convictions among both mothers and adolescents—and $4 saved for every $1 invested in the program.(20)