About AHRQ's National Center for Excellence in Primary Care Research

The National Center for Excellence in Primary Care Research (NCEPCR) is the home for primary care research at AHRQ. NCEPCR is focused on strengthening the Nation's primary care system, providing evidence, practical tools, and other resources for researchers and evaluators, clinicians and clinical teams, quality improvement experts, and healthcare decision makers to improve the quality and safety of care.

Vision

NCEPCR envisions a future where all patients receive high quality, whole person, evidence-based, affordable primary health care from a healthy primary care workforce.

Mission

NCEPCR’s mission is to support transformative primary care research*, tools and methods for implementation, and the next generation of primary care researchers to improve the delivery of primary care.

Key Activities

To achieve this mission, the purpose of NCEPCR’s key activities include: 

• Coordinating primary care research activities across AHRQ.
• Curating and synthesizing information about primary care research across federal HHS agencies.
• Communicating important primary care research findings to the field.
• Convening primary care stakeholders to galvanize new research directions to accelerate the dissemination and implementation of evidence into practice.
• Catalyzing new and innovative primary care research by identifying research gaps and funding primary care research projects.
• Cultivating a diverse primary care research workforce by funding investigator-initiated primary care research.

Values

Key Definitions

*Primary care research: research conducted for the purpose of better understanding or improving primary care¹; more specifically, it is research that is a) conducted in a primary care setting, b) about primary care patients, clinicians, or teams, or c) on a topic that is integral to, or has direct implications for, the delivery of primary care.

¹Primary care: High-quality primary care is the provision of whole person, integrated, accessible, and equitable health care by interprofessional teams who are accountable for addressing the majority of an individual’s health and wellness needs across settings and through sustained relationships with patients, families, and communities (NASEM 2021). The four primary care core functions (Starfield 1998) are:

• First Contact—access and use of primary health care services whenever necessary; the main point of entry into the health system.
• Comprehensiveness—the capacity to provide most of what patients need throughout a patient’s life course, including promotion, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment for a range of health conditions appropriate to the primary care context.
• Coordination— the integration of all the care the user receives and needs with the other health services so that patients receive appropriate care for all their health problems.
• Continuity—longitudinal use of a regular clinician, fostering mutual trust over time.

NCEPCR History

In 1990, AHRQ (in its previous incarnation as the Agency for Healthcare Policy and Research (AHCPR)) sponsored a national conference entitled Primary Care Research: An Agenda for the 90’s, which produced a summary report and primary care research agenda centered on the patient, the practitioner, the problem, and the clinical process of care as they exist and interact with the social structure, the community, practice or program, and healthcare system.

AHRQ’s 1999 authorizing legislation included the establishment of a Center for Primary Care Research that would “serve as the principal source of funding for primary care practice research in the Department of Health and Human Services,” making AHRQ the only federal agency with the statutory authority to be the home for primary care research.

NCEPCR held a Primary Care Research Conference in December 2020 to update insights from the 1990 primary care research conference and provide guidance to AHRQ on a primary care research agenda for the 2020s. Details of the conference and the conference proceedings are here.