MISSION

Enhancing health and wellbeing across
the lifespan through

the wise and effective use of biomedical technologies

"Wise" is in our mission statement because........new technologies bring great benefit but can also bring harms.

"Effective is in our mission statement because........the behavioral and organizational change experts on CAE's staff are skilled in bringing parctice into alignment with evidence based guidelines, best practices, and legal and ethical norms.

The proliferation of biomedical knowledge and new technologies has brought enormous gains for millions of Americans. Yet, these same technologies also raise important questions about how best to ensure their wise and equitable use. Many advances, including for example, life-sustaining medical interventions, new reproductive technologies, and the burgeoning number of genetic screening tests, bring with them the power both to do good and to do harm. Moreover, even when there is consensus about the importance of broadly disseminating these technologies, there are often barriers to their adoption and integration into clinical practice, resulting in troubling practice variations and suboptimal care.

The staff of CAE is experienced in conducting research to better understand the clinical, psychological, organizational, cross-cultural and ethical complexities of knowledge and technology transfer, health care decision-making and service delivery. Based on that research, we design educational programs and other kinds of interventions aimed at improving clinical practice and, ultimately, patient and family well-being.

Typically, CAE focuses on health-care problems that require open and careful examination of personal and societal values, such as decisions to use or forgo life-sustaining treatments in the terminally ill.Thus, a major thrust of the Center's work is on designing methods to help health care professionals, patients, and families explore moral uncertainty and better handle conflicting values. A second, and equally important, emphasis is on the design of interventions to ensure that clinical practice makes more consistent and appropriate use of state-of-the-art technologies.