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100,000 Lives Campaign

Also: 5 Million Lives Campaign (successor, 2006-2008)

“Some is not a number. Soon is not a time.”

Institute for Healthcare Improvement campaign, December 2004 to June 2006, that asked US hospitals to adopt six evidence-based practices (rapid response teams, heart attack care, medication reconciliation, and prevention of central line infections, surgical site infections and ventilator pneumonia) to prevent 100,000 deaths in 18 months. More than 3,000 hospitals enrolled.

Years
2004–2006
Country
United States
Topic
Patient safety
Asks people to
Start
Strategy
Multi level communitySimple instructionSocial norms
Channel
Clinical settingEventsWebsite
Audience
Clinicians
Hospital leaders, physicians, nurses and quality teams in US hospitals (more than 3,000 hospitals, about 75% of US beds).

Evidence

Self-reportedUnknown

IHI announced in June 2006 that participating hospitals prevented an estimated 122,300 deaths. Wachter and Pronovost (2006) showed that secular trends could account for many of these, that case-mix adjustment accounted for nearly three in four "lives saved", that mortality data were unaudited and 14% of hospitals submitted none, and that rapid response teams lacked strong evidence. They credited the campaign with mobilizing hospitals at unprecedented scale.

Sponsor (who paid)

  • Institute for Healthcare Improvement NGO, creator

Credits (who made it)

Not recorded yet.

Executions (individual ads)

Sources

  1. Berwick DM, Calkins DR, McCannon CJ, Hackbarth AD. The 100,000 lives campaign: setting a goal and a deadline for improving health care quality. JAMA 295(3):324-7 sponsor · 2006 · DOI 10.1001/jama.295.3.324 · PMID 16418469
  2. IHI Announces Number of Lives Saved Through Campaign (Infection Control Today) news · 2006
  3. Wachter RM, Pronovost PJ. The 100,000 Lives Campaign: A scientific and policy review. Jt Comm J Qual Patient Saf 32(11):621-7 evaluation · 2006 · DOI 10.1016/s1553-7250(06)32080-6 · PMID 17120921

Research notes

Clinician- and hospital-facing campaign. Discovered 2026-10-22 (clinician-campaigns pass). Infection Control Today release fetched 2026-10-22 (initiated December 2004; 3,000+ hospitals, ~75% of beds; 122,300 estimate). The tagline is Berwick's widely quoted line from the 2004 launch speech; not confirmed on a fetched page. Execution is the 2005 IHI Forum keynote (event year; uploaded recently). Taxonomy gap: topic "patient-safety" is not in docs/taxonomy.md.

Record cases/ihi-100000-lives-campaign.json, updated 2026-10-22· Link to this campaign