Nine months after the 2010 IHI Forum

It's now nine months after the Leadership Summit at the IHI Forum in December 2010, and time to take stock again of our progress. At the IHI Forum we agreed as a group that our mission is to continually and measurably reduce medical errors, building an ever-growing coalition.

My previous updates about our progress have focused on our accomplishments as individuals; this one, for the first time, discusses our accomplishments as a group.

In the last week, a clear majority of our original group of activists/advocates (35 of the 54 of us) have signed a petition promoting transparency of hospitals' JCAHO reviews. Consumers Union and the Leapfrog Group, among other effective advocacy organizations, have joined us on the petition.

Our joint political agenda is emerging, as significant numbers of our members have also come together to spread the use of pulse oximetry among newborns, ban the use of gag clauses in medical settlements, and propose an Ad Council campaign to raise awareness.

Our Facebook group has quadrupled in size since its launch, to 197 participants.

This comes in the shadow of the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The math of our yearly toll from medical errors is grim: a 9/11 every eleven days. We have to get much better at working together. Our challenge is to plan together and collaborate with powerful organizations.