The past decade saw high-profile private and publicly funded initiatives targeted at the patient safety hazards affecting inpatients, including hospital-associated infections and wrong-site surgeries. Now experts are calling for a similar effort focused on the dangers that afflict outpatients.

In 2000, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality set an ambulatory care research agenda to help fill the gap. But the subsequent 10 years amounted to a “lost decade” as outpatient safety research and initiatives took a back seat to problems in hospitals, say the patient safety experts who produced a December 2011 report reviewing about 100 outpatient safety studies from 2000 to 2010.

My latest. Read the whole shebang.