The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and its partners on the Quality Interagency Coordination (QuIC) Task Force, will sponsor a national summit on medical errors and patient safety research September 11, 2000, in Washington, DC. Nominations of witnesses were sought by AHRQ and the other QuIC agencies. This initiative is part of the Federal response to the Institute of Medicine’s landmark November, 1999 report, “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System.” The summit, which will be open to the public and members of the press, will review the information needs of those people and organizations attempting to improve patient safety, assess the current state of medical errors and patient safety research, and develop a coordinated research agenda. The format for the meeting will feature approximately five groups of experts, users of research, and/or other stakeholders, from a broad range of perspectives, who will present short statements to a committee comprised of public- and private-sector funders of research. These presentations will focus on the key research questions that need to be answered to foster improvements in patient safety throughout the nation’s health care system, and their ideas about the approaches that should be taken to answer those questions. Those individuals not selected to testify will be invited to contribute a written statement for the committee’s review.