U.S. Health and Human Services agency funds centers that promote evidence-based decision-making and research
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has awarded a five-year contract to the Johns Hopkins Evidence-based Practice Center (JHU EPC) to help the Center continue to promote evidence-informed decision-making in clinical practice and public health policy. JHU EPC was established in 1997 as a charter member of the EPC Program supported by AHRQ’s Effective Healthcare Program (EHC). Today there are a total of 13 EPC’s.
AHRQ will award up to $49 million to each EPC over the next 5 years. Awards will be made on a project-by-project basis.
The JHU EPC produces comprehensive systematic reviews of important medical topics, including comparisons of medical and/or surgical treatments for specific clinical conditions, comparisons of diagnostic tests for clinical conditions, assessments of strategies for preventing clinical problems, and analyses of alternative approaches to public health problems. The EPC uses interdisciplinary teams that integrate clinical expertise with expertise in evidence-based methods. These include meta-analysis, decision analysis, benefit-harms analysis, and cost-effectiveness analysis. The JHU EPC collaborates with other EPCs and AHRQ programs to advance the methodology at the heart of quality research: systematic reviews, their transparency, and their use in dissemination and identifying what those findings mean.
Eric B. Bass, MD, MPH, and Karen A. Robinson, MSc, PhD, are the directors of the Center.
The Center is jointly supported by the Department of Health Policy and Management and the Department of Epidemiology of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and by the Division of General Internal Medicine of the Department of Medicine of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. The EPC is affiliated with the Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research and with the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research, a collaborative effort of the School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The JHU EPC draws on a wide variety of clinical and methodological experts from the more than 100 departments, institutes, and centers of the School of Medicine and School of Public Health. Given the comprehensive expertise of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in research, clinical practice and education, the JHU EPC is able to bring together collaborative interdisciplinary teams with in-depth clinical and methodological expertise to tackle challenging issues in all areas of clinical medicine, public health, and healthcare policy.
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Media contacts: Susan Murrow at 410-955-7624 or smurrow1@jhu.edu and Barbara Benham at 410-614-6029 or bbenham1@jhu.edu.
