Editorial: Health Services Research in 2020: An Assessment of the Field's Workforce Needs.

As academic fields and professions go, health services research is relatively young. Whether one dates the beginning of this field to the first National Institutes of Health study section on health services research in 1960, the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 and the accompanying drive to develop the conceptual and analytic tools to manage them, or the founding of this journal by the Health Research and Educational Trust with a grant from the U.S. Public Health Service in 1966, its history is much shorter than that of many other disciplines. The field gained its own professional organization only as recently as 1981 with the establishment of the Association of Health Services Research (now called AcademyHealth).