The Durham Center for Health Services Research Center is a mature center in terms of years of VA HSR&D support, the depth and experience of our investigators staff, and our research infrastructure. Now in our 30th year, we strive to better understand and solve important healthcare issues relating to some aspect of primary care for our Veterans. As we seek to become an HSR&D COIN, we have conducted a year-long planning process to better define our key operations partners as well as our focused areas of research. This process has produced three focused areas and one emerging area of research that form the framework of our strategic plan: (1) Translating evidence-based prevention strategies into action, (2) Defining the next generation of chronic disease management within primary care, (3) Optimizing primary care for Veterans with multimorbidity and life-limiting illness, (4) Developing a conceptual framework and correctly identifying high health care utilizers (emerging area). These focused and emerging areas of research build on our faculty's strengths that include both clinical and methodologic expertise. Each of our focused research areas incorporates the expertise of our faculty who direct one of VA HSR&D's four Evidence Synthesis Projects which is embedded in our Center. We also have a strong operations partner in the National Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. That partnership has resulted in a CREATE application that has successfully passed scientific review, and is awaiting a funding decision. The CREATE projects serve as the topic for one focused area of research, and they underlie other research goals and objectives in our strategic plan. We continue to have a strong commitment to education, mentoring, and career development. We have supported one of the VA's largest number of post-doctoral fellows and career development awardees. This has evolved, to a great degree, from ongoing support from the Durham VAMC and VISN 6 leadership who allow us to recruit and support junior investigators. We also have committed academic partners in Duke University School of Medicine and the University Of North Carolina School Of Public Health's Department of Health Policy and Management. Lastly, we have set new and important goals to develop our implementation core in ways that align with our research strengths and the commitment of our main operations partner.
The Durham Center for Health Services Research in Primary Care's vision is to serve as the nation's leader in informing the delivery of primary care to Veterans. Within this broad vision, we have defined three main missions: ' Conduct high quality research on strategies that enhance the delivery, access, quality, and cost- effectiveness of primary care for Veterans and the Veterans Administration (VA) ' Work with our clinical and operations partners to: identify problems of mutual interest, develop feasible, high-priority strategies to address those problems, rigorously evaluate those innovative strategies, and then implement our research findings into practice ' Educate individuals in the techniques of team-based health services research through mentored research and didactic experiences.
