Last year the Institute of Medicine (IOM) published "Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century". The focus of this IOM report is how the health care delivery system can be redesigned to improve care. The report proposes an "agenda" supported by concrete recommendations. This paper shows how the ISO IWA 1 guidance can be practically used to implement some of the IOM recommendations. In 1998, work groups from the American Society for Quality (ASQ) and the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG), representing a large group of payers, began work on similar ISO 9000:2000 series based applications documents. Agreement was reached in 2000 to work together on a common document, HC 1, released in January 2001. Interest from other countries led them to propose release of HC 1 under the auspices of ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, as an Industry Workshop Agreement (IWA), a new category of ISO document. In September 2000, ISO approved their proposal. An international workshop was convened in January 2001. Agreement was subsequently reached, and IWA 1 was released last September. ISO 9000 was developed to assist organizations of all types and size to implement and operate a quality management system.
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