South and North Central Montana Area Health Education Center
(AHEC)

What the heck is an AHEC?

The AHEC (Area Health Education Center) program was developed by Congress in 1971 to recruit, train and retain a health professions workforce committed to underserved populations. The AHEC program helps bring the resources of academic medicine to address local community health needs. The strength of the AHEC Network is its ability to creatively adapt national initiatives to help address local and regional healthcare issues.

Today, 54 AHEC programs with more that 200 centers operate in almost every state and the District of Columbia. Approximately 120 medical schools and 600 nursing and allied health schools work collaboratively with AHECs to improve health for underserved and under-represented populations.

The Montana AHEC Program Office is located at MSU in Bozeman. Four regional offices are in operation, and are located in Dillon, Missoula, Billings and Fairfield.

The Dillon and Fairfield offices, also called the South Central and North Central AHECs respectively, are affiliated with MHA...An Association of Montana Health Care Providers.

These offices serve the following counties within Montana:

Our Mission

The Montana AHEC mission is to improve the supply and distribution of healthcare professionals, with an emphasis on primary care, through community/academic educational partnerships, in order to increase the access to quality healthcare.

In other words, we work to connect students to healthcare careers, professionals to communities, and communities to better health.

To fulfill our mission, we focus on three key areas:

1) Recruitment and Retention of qualified healthcare professionals

2) Pipeline programs for K-12 students to generate interest in healthcare professions.

3) Continuing Education and retention programs for practicing healthcare professionals

For more Information, please visit our websites: www.scmtahec.org or www.ncmtahec.org.  You can also contact us directly at: