New: Division of Digital Healthcare Research

Happy New Year! As 2020 gets underway, I want to let you know about an exciting development here at AHRQ. 

To help sharpen our focus on digital healthcare research and its role in transforming the healthcare system, we’ve taken a fresh look at our digital activities. As a result, we have established the Division of Digital Healthcare Research, within the Agency’s Center for Evidence and Practice Improvement. The Division will support our goal of tapping the enormous potential of data and the digitization of everything (DoE) to address the knowledge needs of providers, health systems, policymakers, and patients. 

In the coming months, we expect AHRQ’s efforts in digital healthcare research to yield more important insights. We will continue to build on earlier foundational work by generating new digital healthcare knowledge and tools that are standards-based, publicly available, and whole-person oriented. For example, a recent AHRQ funding opportunity announcement is intended to foster large-scale projects that improve communication and care transitions through promising health information technologies. 

There is a pressing need for new, energetic research initiatives to explore how the evolving digital healthcare ecosystem can best advance the quality, safety and effectiveness of healthcare for patients and their families – and we at AHRQ are committed to addressing that need.  

To learn more, here’s a link to AHRQ Director Gopal Khanna’s  AHRQ Views blog post and updated website. In addition, please be sure to share via your social media with whomever may have interest in science and research for “21st century care.” Also, follow us on social media and sign up for our weekly newsletter to stay on top of the latest about the Agency.