America’s healthcare systems are falling short when it comes to quality, outcomes, cost, and equity, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine. As much as $750 billion was unnecessarily spent on healthcare in 2009 alone, estimated the IOM committee, a group formed to explore healthcare challenges and to recommend new ways to create a “continuously learning healthcare system.”

The nation would be better served by a “more nimble healthcare system that constantly, systematically, and seamlessly improves,” says the Committee on a Learning Health Care System in America, a group comprised of non-profit, academic, and corporate business leaders.

The committee set out to chart a transition to a healthcare system that learns to better manage problems in real time using new tools. It takes for granted the rapidly falling cost of high-powered computing resources, ubiquitous data connectivity, and improving organizational capabilities. But it finds that simply acknowledging those strengths doesn’t necessarily result in them being put to good use.

“Every missed opportunity for improving healthcare results in unnecessary suffering,” the report says, citing as proof its assessment that nearly 75,000 needless deaths could have been averted in 2005 if every state had delivered care on par with the best performing state.

U.S. progress in lowering the rate of deaths avoidable through healthcare intervention lagged France, Germany, and the United Kingdom between 1999 and 2007, researchers reported in a separate study, published in the September edition of the journal Health Affairs.

To close geographic performance gaps and help improve healthcare systems nationwide, the IOM committee sees roles for regulators to clarify and improve the rules governing the collection and use of clinical data; for clinicians and healthcare organizations to adopt tools that deliver reliable clinical knowledge to patients; and for research, advocacy, and professional organizations to facilitate the development and use of evidence-based and harmonized clinical practice guidelines.

Transforming healthcare systems in the United States won’t be easy, the IOM committee concedes. But left unchanged, it concludes, “healthcare will continue to underperform; cause unnecessary harm; and strain national, state, and family budgets.”