"He got it!" Leape said.

Clinton was responding to a landmark report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) showing that medical errors contribute to more than 1 million injuries and up to 98,000 hospital deaths a year. The release of that report, To Err Is Human, shattered widely held perceptions about the safety of health care in the United States and set a new agenda for protecting patients from medical errors.

For Leape, who was a driving force behind the IOM report, Clinton’s statement - together with immediate responses from Congress, the news media, regulators, professional groups, and the general public - signaled that patient safety had finally captured national attention as a major public health issue.

"Everybody now knows we have a problem. Nobody can pretend it’s not serious," says Leape, whose research helped lay the groundwork for To Err Is Human. He also served on the committee that developed the report for the IOM. Key to the success of To Err Is Human, Leape believes, is the fact that the IOM offered a persuasive solution to the medical errors problem.

"The transforming concept here is that errors are due to faulty systems, not faulty people," says Leape. "We must stop blaming and punishing individuals and begin identifying and correcting systems failures that lead people to make errors."

Under his Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, Leape has taken that message to a wide array of audiences, including the general public, health care workers and managers, regulators, payers, and policymakers. Originally, he planned to do that by writing and publishing a series of essays on patient safety. (To date, one of those essays has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine.)