Great social and economic costs are associated with an incorrect diagnosis of child abuse. However, it is not clear whether the child protection field will itself have the vision and initiative to address this problem proactively and aggressively from within or whether regulation and restriction of activity will be imposed form the outside. While it is necessary to continue expanding child abuse detection efforts to ensure that underreporting does not occur, it is essential to improve the accuracy level of diagnosis. This can be accomplished partly by reducing the fragmentation that occurs through the multiple systems established for detection, medical management, psychological intervention, protection of abused children, and prosecution of alleged perpetrators. Multiagency processes similar to child death review teams are needed to coordinate data and resources from various child care providers and advocates to improve the specificity of child abuse detection while maintaining sensitivity. Pooling of information from agencies, interagency teams, information exchanges across agencies, automated national and regional registries of suspected cases, and routine validity checks are all needed. 4 references