At the present time, IHPC's programs focus on two areas:
- Advocating federal policy to create an integrated healthcare system, and
- Changing the education of health professionals so they are equipped to practice in an integrated system.
Federal Policy Task Force—Our public policy agenda focuses on creating an integrated healthcare system nationwide. Integrated health care is more than integrated medicine. Integrated healthcare gives people access to all the forms of healthcare that are safe and well-regulated in this country, including: conventional medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, chiropractic, therapeutic massage, naturopathic medicine, holistic nursing, and direct-entry midwifery. A comprehensive integrated healthcare system will also be a strong voice for healthy environmental and agricultural policies, since what we eat, breathe and drink has such a powerful and well-documented effect on our health.
Our legislative agenda includes seeing that Congress provides support for both the infrastructure and the research needed to create and sustain a patient-centered, cost-effective integrated healthcare system. We believe that collaborative integrated care will help the United States address many of the ills of our current system, including over-reliance on expensive high technology procedures and the failure to set prevention of disease as an equal priority with treatment.
According to the World Health Organization, the United States spends more money per capita than any other country in the world on health care, but we are not even in the top ten in terms of the quality of care provided. Something is seriously wrong.
IHPC Educational Projects—The importance of the various healthcare providers learning more about one another so that they really are equipped to deliver well-coordinated collaborative care was underscored in recommendations made by both the National Policy Dialogue to Advance Integrated Health Care and the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Health Care Policy (the final reports from these two groups are available on our Resources page). Historically, in the United States, each healthcare profession has educated its own graduates in schools that teach very little about the other health professions. Medical schools train doctors virtually without mentioning the existence of chiropractic and naturopathic physicians, or practitioners of Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, therapeutic massage or any of the other complementary and alternative healthcare professions. Meanwhile, those complementary and alternative health professions have been educating their future practitioners in similar isolation.
In 2003, IHPC created an Education Task Force to explore these problems and devise solutions. The IHPC Education Task Force, in turn, created two vehicles through which to change this "education in isolated silos" and actually prepare future health professionals to work collaboratively. These projects are the Academic Consortium for Complementary and Alternative Health Care (ACCAHC) and the National Education Dialogue to Advance Integrated Health Care: Creating Common Ground (NED).