AOF launches Project Future, a collaborative initiative to transform US healthcare

The American Osteopathic Foundation (AOF) has launched Project Future, a collaborative initiative and strategic roadmap designed to navigate the fast-evolving medical and sociocultural landscape osteopathically.

Project Future will leverage the ever-growing presence of DOs and osteopathic medical students to address critical system failures, including rising healthcare costs and physician shortages in rural and underserved communities. As of 2025, there are over 207,000 DOs and osteopathic medical students in the U.S.

The Project Future vision paper outlines a transition towards “digitally hands-on” medicine, in which artificial intelligence (AI) is used to enhance, rather than replace, the human-centered, empathetic care that defines osteopathic medicine.

The multi-year efforts and diverse perspectives of over 100 osteopathic physicians, medical students, educators, researchers and thought leaders from across the U.S. have culminated in the launch of this new vision paper focusing on four key pillars: professional identity, medical education, clinical practice and research.

The professional identity pillar focuses on unifying the profession’s image and leveraging osteopathic medicine’s unique philosophy to foster leadership in the healthcare field. The initiatives of the medical education pillar aim to modernize the training pipeline and support students throughout their careers.

The goal of the clinical practice pillar is to ensure osteopathic physicians can thrive in increasingly corporate medical environments, while the research pillar seeks to overcome funding disparities by building a more robust, data-driven research infrastructure that includes studies of osteopathic practice philosophy and principles.

Medical education has always been an important pillar of AOF and is further supported by AOF’s collaborative partnership with the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine (AACOM) through the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) Fellowship in Osteopathic Medicine. The fellowship, established in 2014, seeks to “enable talented, early-career health science scholars to participate actively in health- and medicine-related work of the National Academies and to further their careers as future leaders in the field.”

“Our ultimate purpose for Project Future is to bring a broad and diverse group of thinkers together to establish a shared vision for the osteopathic profession, one that is supported by thoughtful strategies that confidently engage and address current healthcare system challenges and anticipate future system evolution,” the report reads—an insight stated by AOF Past President Barbara Ross-Lee, DO. “Our vision embraces our profession’s human-centered clinical practice philosophy to build a truly better future for American healthcare and population health.”

To download the Project Future vision paper, please visit the AOF’s website.

Related reading:

OsteopathicAI: How a professional standard for AI can strengthen our commitment to whole-person care

Digital health literacy: Best practices and resources for osteopathic medical students