The Arts & Health Infrastructure Moment

The Arts & Health Infrastructure Moment
Forty years of arts-led community health practice.
A healthcare system finally ready to meet it.
Presentation by Sam Myers, Chief Strategy and External Affairs Advisor, APAP to the Performing Arts Alliance | March 19, 2026
The field built this. The moment to claim it is now. 
Baseline: What the Arts Sector Has Built Over 40 Years
For nearly four decades, the performing arts sector has been building the foundation for what is now a national health movement. From community artists transforming hospital environments and music therapists developing rigorous clinical protocols to dance companies revolutionizing rehabilitation and orchestras leading Alzheimer's programming, this work has been both profound and enduring. It has flourished across oncology wards, addiction recovery centers, and community wellness initiatives.
This legacy is not a missed opportunity. It is forty years of work that healthcare lacked the frameworks, the evidence standards, and the political will to recognize — until now. The work done in every corner of the country — in hospitals, schools, senior centers, veterans' programs, and community organizations — created a deep, validated, and resilient foundation. The rest of the world is now catching up to what we have known for forty years: that the performing arts are as fundamental a driver of health as is exercise.
Deep Practice, Documented Outcomes
Forty years of performing arts practice produced rigorous documentation — programs, protocols, and outcomes data that constitute a deeply-credible evidence base.
Community-Rooted, Community-Distributed
Arts-in-health programs exist in virtually every community in some way — in hospitals, schools, senior centers, and community organizations. The infrastructure was never missing. It was never connected.
Evidence-Base for a Movement
Forty years of programs, partnerships, and positive outcomes provide the exact evidence base that healthcare systems and policymakers are now urgently seeking.
Why Now Is Different: The Arts and Health Convergence
Seven things are happening simultaneously that have never happened at the same time before. Any one would be notable. Together, they represent a structural shift.
1
The Arts Sector's Financial Fragility Makes Diversification Urgent
SMU DataArts recorded a 30% decline in contributed revenue in 2024 — before new federal legislation like H.R.1 that shrunk nonprofit funding pathways. Healthcare contracts and hospital community benefit funding represent billions annually, independent of philanthropic cycles.
2
The Science Has Reached the Top Journals
Nature Medicine published its first papers on arts and health. Biomarker studies on proteins linked to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and depression are publishing in 2026.
3
Social Prescribing Has Achieved Proof of Concept at Scale
Massachusetts launched the first statewide arts prescription program. Two insurers are paying. SocialRx (formerly Art Pharmacy) now operates in 10 states — Arizona, California, Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. NJPAC secured a seven-figure endowment from Horizon BCBS and RWJBarnabas Health.
4
New Biomarker Data Is the Game-Changer
EpiArts Lab's 2026 biomarker studies are the exercise-research moment of the 1980s — the science that made exercise a legitimate health resource. The same shift is now happening for the arts. (Dr. Jill Sonke, University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine - Arts Rx Panel, APAP|NYC 2026)
5
The Loneliness Epidemic Has Opened a Political Lane
The Surgeon General's 2023 advisory declared loneliness a public health epidemic. Congress responded with bipartisan legislation in both chambers.
6
The Current Political Environment Has Opened a Specific Lane
The NEA's stated priorities now explicitly include Make America Healthy Again driven funding for arts and health grants — opioid recovery, veteran care, aging, chronic disease prevention. NEA Chairman Mary Anne Carter has named arts and healing a personal priority.
7
The Surround Sound on Capitol Hill — and in State Capitals — Has Opened a New Lane
Arts and health is seven different multi-partisan issues in Congress — loneliness, youth mental health, aging, veterans, chronic disease, rural infrastructure, health equity. Every Member has a door. And the states aren't waiting: Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Minnesota, and California have already moved from policy to practice. PAA has standing to walk through every one of these doors — federal and state — if we publicly claim arts and health infrastructure as our mandate.
The hunger is real. When NMF CEO Michellene Davis took the stage at APAP|NYC 2026, she opened by saying how excited she was to be in a room full of fellow healthcare workers. APAP's new partnership with National Medical Fellowships — 80 years of institutional credibility, 45,000+ physician alumni — is already in motion, pursuing arts and health CME curriculum, medical education, and healthcare sector funding. That's not a pilot. That's a signal.
The Arts and Health Convergence Gap: Whoever Closes It Leads
What Healthcare Is Running Toward — and Running Past
Healthcare is genuinely excited. They see a non-pharmaceutical, cost-effective intervention for problems pharmaceutical approaches aren't solving well: loneliness, chronic disease prevention, behavioral health, patient engagement, and healthcare worker burnout.
The money is already moving. The reimbursement infrastructure now exists and is being used — not just theorized. Insurance companies are paying for arts prescriptions. Medicaid waivers are funding social determinants interventions. The pathways are open; but arts organizations are largely unaware they can walk through them.
The ROI data is now peer-reviewed and citable: a 2025 national study found social prescribing generates a 9:1 return on investment in wellbeing outcomes. Healthcare CXOs will take that meeting.
Two consecutive administrations have made this a federal priority. On opposite sides of the aisle — the Biden Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic; the Trump HHS and MAHA Commission are calling for non-pharmaceutical, community-based chronic disease prevention. Congress has bipartisan legislation across seven health issue areas. When the policy signal is this consistent across administrations, it is not a trend — it is a structural shift.
And they see one organized supply-side problem: they cannot find, vet, and contract with arts organizations at scale.
What the Arts Sector Has Earned — and Could Still Lose
Many in our field are exhausted from 40 years of advocacy. They've built real programs with inadequate resources. They've been told the evidence isn't strong enough — only to watch the evidence become irrefutable while resources still don't materialize.
The real risk of seeing this moment as one more of many: infrastructure gets built around the arts rather than with us — social prescribing platforms, care navigators with no arts expertise making connections, medical schools writing university and continuing medical education curriculum without arts professionals at the table.
Both sides are right. PAA's role is to ensure the convergence benefits the performing arts ecosystem that built the foundation.
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The Gaps: Specific and Closable
The problem is not lack of evidence or lack of programs. The gaps are specific and closable.
No Organized Supply Chain
Health systems that want arts partnerships cannot find, vet, and contract with arts organizations at scale. Individual programs are invisible to each other.
No Touring Pipeline into Health Settings
Hospitals, infusion clinics, senior living communities, and rehab centers are an untapped presenting circuit. The venues and audiences exist. The organized arts supply side does not.
No Physician Training at Scale
No CME-accredited arts prescribing curriculum exists in the United States. A doctor never trained to write an arts prescription will not write one.
Arts Orgs Can't Access Healthcare Funding
HCPCS code G0176 covers activity therapy in clinical settings. Schedule H community benefit funding exists. Medicaid waivers fund social determinants interventions. Arts organizations are almost entirely unaware.
Artists Not Compensated as Healthcare Professionals
Even where programs exist, artists are paid as independent contractors for one-off engagements — without benefits, professional development, or career pathways.
Recognition Has Not Followed the Work
Healthcare is celebrating as "innovative" what arts practitioners have built for decades. Credit, infrastructure, and revenue risk flowing to intermediaries rather than to the artists who built the field.
The Partnership Portfolio: PAA's Strategic Differentiator
The NMF relationship is the proof of concept for a new kind of APAP strategic role. The arts-health moment asks our broader alliance to be the entity that builds institutional relationships its member organizations cannot build individually, but will build at scale together — and that secures cross-sector legitimacy the whole field benefits from.
The Multiplier Effect
A performing arts organization in a mid-sized city cannot call up the regional medical school and propose arts-health curriculum development. Now APAP can, with NMF as co-proponent. A single orchestra cannot negotiate a social prescribing contract with a regional health system. Now APAP can, with the infrastructure the curriculum partnership creates.
Every partnership PAA builds at the institutional level could create pathways that every member organization can access at the local level.
The Three-to-Five-Year Vision
A PAA that has established formal relationships with organizations like NMF, AACN, LeadingAge, NACCHO, the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, and others — and has used those relationships to build the curriculum, the referral infrastructure, the contracting templates, local arts as trust hubs, and the advocacy position that the entire performing arts sector benefits from. PAA is the only entity positioned to build it.
Not as a service organization that does the work for its members. As the coalition that creates the conditions in which its members can do the work.
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The Partnership Model: Who Are the Other NMFs?
The APAP–NMF partnership is the model. The question is: who else belongs in a portfolio of cross-sector institutional partnerships?
Clinical Education
National Medical Fellowships — 80 years of credibility, 45,000+ physician alumni, CME and medical education pipeline.
American Association of Colleges of Nursing — 2021 Essentials already require arts and humanities knowledge; reaches nursing prescribers at scale.
American Association of Nurse Practitioners — frontline prescribers in social determinants frameworks.
Social Work & Link Workers
Council on Social Work Education — accredits 750+ programs; getting arts prescription into accreditation standards builds the link-worker pipeline.
National Association of Social Workers — controls continuing education standards for 130,000+ social workers nationally.
Behavioral Health Networks
National Council for Mental Wellbeing — 3,400+ community mental health centers and substance use programs serving 10 million people annually. A direct pathway to facilities that could become both presenters of and referrers to arts programming.
Aging & Senior Care
LeadingAge — 5,000+ nonprofit aging services providers serving 2 million older adults annually. The single largest distributed health-setting venue category where performing arts touring infrastructure is currently absent at scale.
Public Health Systems
National Association of County and City Health Officials — represents local health departments that administer SAMHSA grants, manage opioid settlement funds, and conduct community health needs assessments.
National Association of Community Health Centers — 31 million patients across federally qualified health centers.
Employer Wellness
Health Transformation Alliance and Business Group on Health — represent large employers managing health benefits for tens of millions of workers. Employee wellness is a $60B annual market. Arts programming for workforce wellbeing is an underutilized category.
Health Systems & Hospitals
American Hospital Association — community benefit requirements create a direct funding pathway for arts-health programming.
Social Prescribing USA — the emerging national infrastructure for arts and social prescribing reimbursement.
The pattern across all of these is the same as NMF: PAA brings the arts infrastructure, the institutional partner brings sector-specific credibility and access. The PAA role is to identify, broker, and sustain these partnerships — ensuring curriculum, protocols, and referral standards reflect the performing arts sector's expertise.
And the NEA as Institutional Validator, Not Just a Funder
"The arts are essential to creating, innovating, healing, and recovery."
— NEA Chairman Mary Anne Carter, confirmed by the Senate, December 2025
The NEA's FY2027 Grants for Arts Projects guidelines explicitly state support for "arts and health programs, including creative arts therapies, that advance the well-being of people and communities" — with specific callouts for military service members, veterans, pediatric cancer care, and other childhood diseases.
The Practical Implication
When the NEA says arts and health is a priority, it signals to every Member of Congress, every federal agency partner, and every healthcare funder that this is a legitimate field of investment — not fringe advocacy.
Regional arts organizations have already been advised to appeal NEA termination notices based on the health priority, referencing WHO, Mayo Clinic, and University of Florida research.
PAA's Seat at the Table
PAA should be coordinating with the NEA actively — not just applying for grants, but positioning itself as the field organizer that amplifies the NEA's arts-health priorities.
The NEA's imprimatur is validation that the arts sector can bring into every conversation with a healthcare system, an insurer, a grant committee, or a Congressional staffer.
The Political Advocacy Map: Arts & Health as a Multi-Door Entry Point
PAA's current issues give us standing with Members who care about the arts. Arts and health gives us standing with Members who care about health — which is every Member of Congress, through at least six different constituent lenses.
Federal: Key Legislation (119th Congress)
Improving Measurements for Loneliness & Isolation Act — Reps. Bera (D-CA) & Flood (R-NE); Sens. Ricketts (R-NE) & Hassan (D-NH)
Youth Mental Health Research Act (H.R. 2587/S.1266) — Reps. Watson Coleman (D-NJ), Kean (R-NJ), Fitzpatrick (R-PA); Sens. Klobuchar (D-MN) & Britt (R-AL)
SENIOR Act (S.473) — Sens. Scott (R-FL), Smith (D-MN) & Warnock (D-GA)
National Strategy for Social Connection Act — Sen. Murphy (D-CT) (118th Congress; not yet reintroduced in 119th)
Older Americans Act Reauthorization (S.2120)
Creative Forces Program (NEA/DoD/VA) — decade-long federal validation of arts-based therapies for veterans; active in 119th Congress appropriations
Health Investment Zones Act (S.3840) — Rural health infrastructure
Pursuing Equity in Mental Health Act (S.1448/H.R.2904) — Youth of color (Democratic-led; no Republican co-sponsors)
Champions Across the Aisle
Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) — Youth mental health
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) — Youth mental health
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) — Community health
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) — Arts & health, veterans
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) — Social connection
Rep. Mike Bost (R-IL) — Veterans' Affairs Chair
Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) — Physician-legislator, health equity
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) — Bipartisan mental health
Rep. Mike Flood (R-NE) — Rural/heartland loneliness
State: Where It's Already Law or Policy
Massachusetts — First statewide arts prescription program (2024). Mass Cultural Council + SocialRx (formerly Art Pharmacy) + Mass General Brigham. Two insurers paying for arts prescriptions.
New Jersey — NJPAC secured a seven-figure endowment from Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield and RWJBarnabas Health. Model for healthcare-arts institutional partnership.
New York — NYC Health + Hospitals arts-in-health programs embedded in clinical settings. State aging policy includes creative arts programming.
Minnesota — State arts board arts-health integration. Mayo Clinic arts program. Strong rural arts-health infrastructure.
California — Arts in corrections, aging, and community health embedded in state health policy. Arts equity programs tied to SDOH frameworks.
Connecticut — Arts and health integration in community health centers. Sen. Murphy's Social Connection Act reflects state-level momentum.
UK/NHS (International Validator) — Social prescribing nationally embedded in primary care. 9:1 ROI documented in peer-reviewed national study (2025). The model the US is now replicating.
Broader Opportunities: The Largest Expansion in a Generation
This is not a cost — it is the largest expansion of the performing arts field's market, legitimacy, and financial sustainability in a generation.
New Funding Streams
Nonprofit hospitals spent $149 billion on community benefits in 2022. Insurance contracts for arts prescriptions are live in Massachusetts. SAMHSA, Medicaid waivers, HRSA, and employer wellness programs ($60B annual market) are additional streams — none dependent on NEA appropriations.
Health Systems as New Presenters
Every hospital system, long-term care network, infusion clinic, and senior living community is a potential booking — with captive audiences, administrative capacity to contract, and growing awareness that environment of care affects outcomes.
Artists Written into Medical Education
The NMF–APAP collaboration to build the first CME-accredited arts prescribing curriculum would create sustained demand for APAP member organizations as the verified destination for prescriptions — and a professional pathway with commensurate compensation.
Sustainable Artist Employment
Healthcare contracts enable W-2 employment for artists — salaried, benefits-eligible positions as artist-in-residence, care navigators with arts expertise, and hospital arts educators. The Artists at Work model has demonstrated this is achievable.
A Vastly Expanded Audience
When a physician writes an arts prescription, the patient may be experiencing professional performing arts for the first time — cost covered, transportation addressed, clinical referral providing the social permission that anxiety would otherwise block. The payer is the insurer or hospital, not the patron.
The Investor and Funding Partner Ecosystem
The arts-health infrastructure will not be built on NEA grants alone. What this moment requires is a portfolio of investors who each have genuine skin in the game — who benefit from the infrastructure being built, not just from the idea of it existing.
Health Insurers
Social prescribing research shows a $4.43 healthcare cost return for every dollar invested addressing social isolation among health plan members with chronic illness — with estimated savings of $296M annually from reduced hospital admissions. Art Pharmacy has already contracted with two statewide insurers. Targets: Horizon BCBS, BCBS Association, Humana, regional Medicaid MCOs.
Large Employers
The corporate wellness market is failing — spending dropped 19% per employee between 2023 and 2025. Nearly 70% of workers don't use their company's wellbeing resources. Family premiums projected at nearly $30,000 in 2026. Arts prescription offers a documented 4:1 healthcare cost ROI that outperforms gym memberships and meditation apps.
Health Systems
Programs with arts-health components show reductions in primary care visits of up to 42% and emergency department use of up to 24%. Mass General Brigham has already implemented arts prescriptions in affiliated community health clinics. Schedule H community benefit reporting makes arts partnerships a vehicle for demonstrating community investment.
Foundations
RWJF ($13B+ assets) is launching a 2026 research program explicitly valuing "cultural and community knowledge as equally important" to academic insights — a direct opening. Bloomberg Philanthropies funds EpiArts Lab. Kresge has both Health and Arts programs. John A. Hartford Foundation funds Social Prescribing USA at Kaiser Permanente.
AI and Technology
The arts-health pipeline generates clinical-adjacent data — patient preferences, behavioral outcomes, engagement patterns — requiring technology infrastructure to match and optimize at scale. Art Pharmacy has already built a recommendation engine. For technology companies, this is an entry into healthcare AI not competing in the crowded EHR space.
What Needs to Happen: The PAA Role
PAA is not a programming organization. What it does — coordinate a unified voice, align interests across the sector, build knowledge, and advocate before policymakers — is exactly what this moment requires.
Claim a Seat at the Health Policy Table
Co-sponsor loneliness and mental health legislation — PAA as a named organizational supporter of bipartisan bills already in motion
Name arts prescribing in SAMHSA behavioral health bills and advocate for Medicaid and Medicare coverage of arts-based interventions
Include performing arts organizations in the Older Americans Act reauthorization as eligible service providers
Show up on Hill Days differently — not as arts advocates asking for NEA funding, but as health infrastructure providers solving problems Members are already working on
Build the Knowledge Infrastructure
Codify what exists in pockets — hospital community benefit contracts, Schedule H mechanics, insurer outcome metrics, social prescribing negotiation templates
Create a clearinghouse of replicable models, contract templates, and outcome frameworks that any member organization can access and adapt
Commission or aggregate the evidence that healthcare partners require — translating 40 years of arts-health practice into the language of clinical outcomes and ROI
Train the field — webinars, convenings, and toolkits so member organizations can navigate healthcare contracting without starting from zero
Advocate for Artists as Healthcare Professionals
Insist artists are at the table when CME curriculum is written, social prescribing platforms are designed, and reimbursement rates are set
Establish compensation standards — artists delivering healthcare-adjacent programming should be paid as healthcare professionals, not as volunteers or gig workers
Ensure social prescribing platforms pay arts organizations whose programming makes prescriptions work — not just the technology intermediaries
Build the case for W-2 artist employment in healthcare settings — salaried, benefits-eligible positions as artists-in-residence, care navigators, and hospital arts educators
Become the Organized Supply Side
Present a unified performing arts field to healthcare partners who need organized infrastructure, not a patchwork of disconnected programs
Build the vetting and credentialing framework that health systems require before contracting — so member organizations are pre-qualified, not unknown
Create the referral infrastructure — the directory, the intake protocols, the outcome reporting standards — that makes arts prescribing scalable
Be the entity healthcare calls when it wants to contract with the performing arts sector at scale
Unlock Greater Funding as A Coalition
NEA Research Labs — federal validation and research infrastructure
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — Exploring Equitable Futures and health equity funding streams
NIH/National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health — biomedical research partnerships
Johnson & Johnson independent CME grant program — pharmaceutical-adjacent education funding
Hospital community benefit funds — $149B spent annually by nonprofit hospitals; arts organizations are eligible but largely unknown to hospital CFOs
Medicaid waivers and SAMHSA grants — public health funding streams that require organized sector infrastructure to access
What's Next
Arts organizations are the missing middle layer between clinical care and community health. Every category of investor and partner named above is already spending on the problem that arts prescription solves — loneliness, chronic disease prevention, behavioral health, workforce burnout, community benefit compliance. They just don't have a vetted, scalable, nationally-connected infrastructure to route that spending through effectively.
What PAA can Do
Formally affirm arts and health as a PAA advocacy priority — not as a new program, but as the frame that makes 40 years of existing member work visible, fundable, and politically powerful. Name it. Claim it. Build toward it.
What That Unlocks
A seat at every health policy table in Washington. Access to $149 billion in annual hospital community benefit spending. Bipartisan congressional relationships across seven issue areas. Healthcare funders who are actively looking for what PAA's members have already built. And a performing arts field that is no longer dependent on a single appropriations line.
What Is at Stake If We Don't
Healthcare will build its arts-health infrastructure with or without the performing arts sector. Social prescribing platforms, hospital wellness programs, and insurance reimbursement models are forming now. The question is not whether this infrastructure gets built. The question is whether performing arts organizations are inside it — or watching it from the outside.
Thank you. 