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Our health is influenced by diverse factors — not only by medical care and our health care system, but also by our work, our level of education and income, where we live and many other things that are together referred to as social determinants of health (SDH).

America's health care system has become far too complex and costly to continue business as usual. Pervasive inefficiencies, an inability to manage a rapidly deepening clinical knowledge base, and a reward system poorly focused on key patient needs, all hinder improvements in the safety and quality of care and threaten the nation's economic stability and global competitiveness.

The publication highlights how seven programs from California, Illinois, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia train a variety of health care professionals to work together as teams in patient-centered medical homes.

This inaugural report of the Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Center (OWHIC) explores the future of healthcare between now and 2025. It offers an overview of three major waves of innovation that over the next decade will bring us to a new patient-centered and value-based approach to healthcare delivery.

Abstract

If we are to achieve better health along the continuum of care from birth to death, we need to work across professional boundaries and better integrate the systems we have established to promote health. That was the framework that brought more than 70 thought leaders to Washington to participate in an historic, invitation-only two-day conference, “Reconnecting Public Health and Care Delivery to Improve the Health of Populations,” held May 4-5, 2014.

Medical Education in the United States and Canada is a comprehensive report to the foundation, by Abraham Flexner, on medical education in the United States and Canada, with regard to the course of study, financial aspects, medical sects, state boards, post-graduate schools, and other special forms of medical education; with descriptive and tabular accounts of all of the medical schools throughout the United States and Canada; and a general plan for reconstruction, with an introduction by the president of the foundation.

Rural America is a vital component of American society. Representing nearly 20 percent of the population, rural communities, like urban landscapes, are rich in cultural diversity.  However, the smaller, poorer, and more isolated a rural community is, the more difficult it is to ensure the availability of high-quality health services.  The Institute of Medicine report, Quality Through Collaboration: The Future of Rural Health examines the quality of health care in rural America.

In the Eigth Annual Report of the Advisory Committee on Interdisciplinary, Community-Based Linkages (ACICBL), the committee writes that health care professional shortages, insufficient numbers of faculty members, demographic changes in the rural population, a strained delivery system, and emerging health care needs affecting quality of care combine to make unprecedented demands on the rural health care system.

In 2008, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the IOM launched a two-year initiative to respond to the need to assess and transform the nursing profession. The IOM appointed the Committee on the RWJF Initiative on the Future of Nursing, at the IOM, with the purpose of producing a report that would make recommendations for an action-oriented blueprint for the future of nursing. Through its deliberations, the committee developed four key messages: