Craig A. Umscheid, M.D., M.S.

Craig A. Umscheid, M.D., M.S., is a hospitalist and clinical epidemiologist who serves as Director of the Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (CQuIPS) at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Before joining AHRQ, Dr. Umscheid served as Chief Quality and Innovation Officer and Vice President of Healthcare Delivery Science at the University of Chicago. He began his career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he became the inaugural Vice Chair of Quality and Safety for the Department of Medicine and was a cofounder and Director of Penn’s Center for Evidence-based Practice.

His career has been dedicated to disseminating and implementing research evidence into clinical practice to support the safety, quality, and value of patient care. This work has been supported by AHRQ, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It has been described in more than 125 peer-reviewed publications and cited more than 15,000 times.

Dr. Umscheid co-led an AHRQ Evidence-based Practice Center while at Penn. In addition, he has coauthored clinical practice guidelines with CDC, NIH, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America. He is also a former chair of the PCORI Advisory Panel on Healthcare Delivery and Disparities Research and a former Deputy Editor of the Journal of General Internal Medicine. 

Dr. Umscheid is a past member of AHRQ’s Patient Centered Clinical Decision Support Learning Network Steering Committee and the Medicare Evidence Development and Coverage Advisory Committee. He is currently Co-Chair of the National Steering Committee for Patient Safety, a collaboration of more than 30 national organizations in the United States committed to patient and healthcare worker safety. 

Dr. Umscheid received his undergraduate degree from Cornell and his medical degree from Georgetown. He trained in internal medicine at the University of Chicago and received a master of science in clinical epidemiology from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a primary care physician-scientist fellow supported by a National Research Service Award from the Health Resources and Services Administration. 

Before directing CQuIPS, Dr. Umscheid was Director of the Evidence-based Practice Center Division and the Senior Science Advisor of the Center for Evidence and Practice Improvement at AHRQ. While at AHRQ, Dr. Umscheid has provided voluntary clinical service in hospital medicine at Georgetown, where he is an Adjunct Professor of Medicine.