Welcome to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ) Research Funding Opportunities Web site. AHRQ's mission is to improve the quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of health care for all Americans. AHRQ fulfills its mission through establishing a broad base of scientific research to promote improvements in clinical and health system practices, including the prevention of diseases and other health conditions.
Strategic Goals
AHRQ is a research agency. However, it is important to note that research is only a beginning and not an end in itself. On a daily basis, this means ensuring that providers use evidence-based research to deliver high-quality health care and to work with their patients as partners. Evidence garnered from research helps patients to become better informed health care consumers and to be partners in their own care. It also means working at the grassroots level to help local policymakers understand what they can do to improve the quality of health care for their constituents and ensuring that local public health officials have the latest information to help them coordinate their resources and be well prepared in the event of a public health emergency.
Accomplishing these goals requires a strategic approach to assure that research findings are ready to be used, widely available, and actionable. This step is a critical component of AHRQ's new vision, which is to foster and support research that helps America's health care system provide access to high quality, cost-effective services and to be accountable and responsive to consumers and purchasers. Ultimately, the goal is to improve health status and quality of life across the Nation.
Health Care Challenges
America's rapidly evolving health care system poses challenges to all of us: providers, purchasers, policymakers, researchers, and the public. Public attention to such issues as patient safety, quality, and disparities in health care highlights the importance of research that can both identify problems and develop viable solutions. I welcome your research efforts as we face these challenges by producing, translating, and disseminating research findings geared toward transforming and improving our health care system. I applaud your work and remain confident that the health services research enterprise is exciting, rigorous, and critically important to improving health and health care for all Americans.
Carolyn M. Clancy, M.D.
Director
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Current as of June 2005
Internet Citation:
Director's Welcome. Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. http://www.ahrq.gov/fund/dirwelcome.htm
540 Gaither Road Rockville, MD 20850