A workforce of knowledgeable health professionals is critical to the discovery and application of health care practices to prevent disease and promote well-being. Today in the United States, the professional health workforce is not consistently prepared to provide high quality health care and assure patient safety, even as the nation spends more per capita on health care than any other country. The absence of a comprehensive and well-integrated system of continuing education (CE) in the health professions is an important contributing factor to knowledge and performance deficiencies at the individual and system levels… In one attempt to better understand the possibilities for improving CE, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation convened a conference in 2007 that brought together stakeholders in health care and continuing health professional education. Agreeing that the current state of CE in the United States is inadequate, the stakeholders recommended that a national interprofessional continuing education institute be created and charged with ‘advancing the science of CE.’