Imagine a health care system that came to you -- a system that met you, as an individual, where you are, in your home, workplace, or community.   Such a system would anticipate your needs and work to keep you as healthy as possible, and view any of your needs to access “sick care” as a possible sign that the system had let you down.   This system would address the upstream drivers of your health status, and yet be as convenient and accessible as other elements of your life that you now take for granted, like ordering online.   Such a system could be called ‘Health Care Without Walls.’

In this plenary, you will learn about the Network for Excellence in Health Innovation (NEHI) initiative to imagine what a vision of Health Care Without Walls could look like in 2025, if and when all aspects of current technologies – from telemedicine to remote monitoring, and from fully interoperable electronic health records to artificial intelligence – were brought to bear to create it. NEHI’s President and CEO, Susan Dentzer, will describe current trends and examples moving us toward the vision of Health Care Without Walls, and how you can advocate for public policy changes and private sector measures to achieve it.

Although there will be many benefits in achieving a far more distributed system of care outside of conventional institutional settings, such as hospitals, physicians’ offices, and nursing homes, a number of payment/reimbursement, regulatory, work force, and human factors issues must be addressed before such a system can be realized.  In particular, Dentzer will discuss the many implications for the nation’s health care work force; education and training of health care professionals; and in particular, interprofessional education and training to deliver the team-based, virtually enabled care that will increasingly be the norm.