Center for Evidence and Practice Improvement (CEPI)

The Director of CEPI is Dr. Arlene Bierman.

Specifically, the Center for Evidence and Practice Improvement (CEPI)* conducts and supports research and evidence synthesis on health care delivery and improvement; advances decision and communication sciences to facilitate informed treatment and health care decisionmaking by patients and their health care providers; explores how health information technology can improve clinical decisionmaking and health care quality; catalyzes and promotes sustainability of improvements in clinical practice across health care settings through research, demonstration projects, and partnership development; and operates the National Center for Excellence in Primary Care Research.

CEPI consists of five divisions:

1. Evidence-Based Practice Center Program: Produces evidence syntheses by conducting systematic evidence reviews using robust and rigorous methodologies and advances the methods of evidence synthesis to ensure scientific rigor and unbiased reviews.
2. U.S. Preventive Services Task Force Program: Provides scientific, administrative, and dissemination support for the independent U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, enabling the Task Force to make evidence-based recommendations on clinical preventive services.
3. Division of Decision Science and Patient Engagement: Supports informed decisionmaking by translating evidence-based findings into tools and products that communicate what works in health care. Collaborates with stakeholders to promote evidence-based decisionmaking. Advances research into methods and products that summarize evidence and engage patients, health care professionals, policymakers, and communities in improving health care and clinical decisionmaking.
4. Division of Health Information Technology: Develops and disseminates evidence to inform policy and practice on how health information technology can improve the quality of health care.
5. Division of Practice Improvement: Advances the science of clinical practice improvement; evaluates and supports innovative models of practice transformation in diverse settings; facilitates communities of learning to promote the implementation of evidence for practice improvement; and serves as a trusted source of evidence and tools for methods, measures, and evaluation of practice improvement.

CEPI is also home to AHRQ’s National Center for Excellence in Primary Care Research (NCEPCR).

AHRQ believes that revitalizing the Nation’s primary care system is foundational to achieving AHRQ’s mission of improving the quality, safety, accessibility, equity, and affordability of health care. The Agency’s authorizing legislation requires AHRQ to advance the field of primary care research and to establish a Center for this work.

The NCEPCR is the intellectual home for primary care and primary care researchers across AHRQ. As the locus for the wide array of primary care-related activities within the Agency, the Center provides opportunities for AHRQ scientists to share concepts, ideas, challenges, and emerging solutions. The NCEPCR also is AHRQ’s main point of contact with the primary care community, communicating the evidence AHRQ produces —and how this evidence can be used to improve health and primary health care—to researchers, primary care professionals, health care decisionmakers, and patients and families.

*CEPI consolidates and represents a realignment of the functions of two former AHRQ research centers: the Center for Outcomes and Evidence (COE) and the Center for Primary Care, Prevention, and Clinical Partnerships (CP3).