About Us

CERC is the first university-based research center exclusively dedicated to discovering, testing and evaluating cost-saving innovations in clinically excellent care. We are located in the School of Medicine (Department of Medicine) at Stanford University. 

In the first five years, CERC developed a unique research fellowship program in the discovery of lower cost methods of high quality care, drawing fellows and faculty from Medicine, Engineering, and Social Sciences.

We established deeper research partnerships with faculty from the Engineering School’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Biomedical Informatics Research Center. CERC also developed collaborative programs with researchers at other institutions such as Brigham and Women's Hospital, Intermountain Health Care, and the University of Aarhus, and with diverse health care funders, payers, and delivery systems in the US and Asia. We now seek to recruit research faculty who will build on these assets and collaborate with each other to accelerate research progress. 

CERC is currently investigating three domains carrying substantial potential to improve the value of care delivery, including:

•   “Bright Spots”: we identify and study clinical teams that already deliver high quality care at a low cost compared to peers

•   Human Experience of Care Research: we identify the most deeply felt unmet needs of patients, providers and families

•   Artificial Intelligence Assisted Care Research: we experiment with applications of low cost artificial intelligence systems to assure high value clinical work-flows

CERC’s design fellowship trains teams of post-doctoral fellows from medicine, engineering, and social sciences to discover and compose new care delivery methods that lower population-wide spending for high quality healthcare.