What is the Future of Health Education in the US?

The primary US healthcare challenge has shifted from infectious and acute diseases to chronic ones. The healthcare factories of America’s Industrial Era, primarily hospitals and nursing homes, are diminishing. The number of hospital beds per 1,000 Americans is down 75% since 1960. Nursing homes are closing at a rate of 200 to 300 per year. The average length of stay in an Assisted Living facility has reduced to one year. Frail older people will remain in their communities. Like America’s other major economic sectors, healthcare will have to move quickly from the Industrial/Institutional into the Network Era.

This shift will require a dramatic restructuring of the training and education of health professionals, tailored to a dramatically different human care delivery system. Current programs were designed to meet the needs of the previous Industrial Era acute care delivery system. Various disciplines are sequestered from one another, with sharp boundaries between them.

Professional practice in the health care industry is tightly regulated by laws and licensing agencies. The entire health industry in the United States and all of its segments have been organized around carefully defined scopes of practice, the boundaries of which are battled over by professional associations and health regulators. Agencies have historically acted as a…