Pathology is entering an new era where it will need to significantly mobilize new resources to face the challenges posed by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and Rand Corporation’s call to arms for patient safety. In 1999 the IOM reported in “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System” that the medical community was responsible for many serious errors in the delivery of care. The focus of the report was on “system” errors and but did not deal with diagnostic errors. The report implicated the lack of clear cut clinical documentation and the lack of standards (both in vocabularies and common data elements) as key problems in many errors. The report has had a broad impact on health care delivery and patient safety research. A was written by Sirota in 2000 which lays the foundation for the central thesis of this article. It is the goal of this lecture to review of the implications of the IOM report for Pathology and to describe how Pathology Informatics can play a critical role in the detection, prevention and correction of errors.