Incubating 21st century health care professionals.

Here we are at a coffee shop in South Boston, commiserating over the latest higher education buzz. The talk is about President Obama taking aim at student debt load, gainful employment, and health care. We recently visited several remarkable health profession institutions to see how they will meet the challenge of providing affordable, quality health care education--recognizing that their teaching and learning outcomes will drive patient outcomes.

At the edge of South Boston sits the Catholic institution, Laboure College. Having served Greater Boston for 120 years, today its niche is preparing evidence-based nursing leaders with 21st century health care skills--the kind of better practices and just-in-time solutions that can ratchet down costs and increase quality of care.

This institution is owned by a fast growing, for-profit health care system. At her inauguration ceremony at the JFK Library, Laboure President Maureen Smith conveyed this message: "I see an institution that is well integrated into the Steward Healthcare System--a system committed to world class health care offered in the communities where we live. I believe that Laboure can and will be a vital educational asset within our system."

Established in 1912 and located in North Chicago, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science embraces "life in discovery"--an innovative health science education model where interdisciplinary health care teams with different specialties learn, teach, and practice together for the benefit of the whole patient. In our walking tour of the medical school's cadaver lab, we learned from President K. Michael Welch that RFUMS is genuinely committed to inter-professional, team-based education with a special focus on predictive and preventative medicine and fully integrated models of health care delivery.

Our final stop is the University of Alabama, Birmingham. The UAB School of Health Professions offers centers for research in nutrition, obesity, and diabetes. UAB consistently ranks in the top 5 percent of U.S. nursing schools.

These venerable health profession institutions have reimagined health care higher learning in a way that leverages 21st century skills from an interdisciplinary perspective--connecting student competencies with quality patient outcomes and emergent health care needs of a fast aging American population.

For more on health care colleges, see the online version of this column at www.universitybusiness.com.

--James Martin and James E. Samels, Future Shock columnists, are authors of Turnaround: Leading Stressed Colleges and Universities to Excellence (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Martin is a professor of English at Mount Ida College (Mass.) and Samels is president and CEO of The Education Alliance.