The History of Regional Medical Programs: The Life and Death of a Small Initiative of the Great Society (review)

The Regional Medical Program (RMP), a policy of the Johnson administration that persisted until 1975, offered health professionals and provider organizations incentives to improve the integration of primary, secondary, and tertiary care for chronic disease under the leadership of medical schools and their principal teaching hospitals. In theory, research-based knowledge—especially about heart disease, cancer, and stroke—would move down regional hierarchies from academic health centers; patients would move up and down these hierarchies, as appropriate.