| Summary: | The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is the lead Federal agency charged with improving the quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of health care for all Americans. As 1 of 12 agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services, AHRQ supports health services research to improve the quality of health care and promote evidence-based decisionmaking; AHRQ supports a variety of comparative effectiveness or patient-centered outcomes research (CER/PCOR) activities through its Effective Health Care (EHC) Program. The EHC Program funds individual researchers, research centers, and academic organizations that work with AHRQ to produce effectiveness and comparative effectiveness research for clinicians, consumers, and policymakers. To contribute to its agenda for CER/PCOR activities related to mental health, AHRQ contracted the RTI International-University of North Carolina (RTI-UNC) Evidence-based Practice Center (EPC) and the Scientific Resource Center Stakeholder Engagement Team to engage a broad and representative group of stakeholders to discuss issues related to serious mental illness (SMI) in a series of three meetings (Issues Exploration Forum [IEF]), as detailed in the methods section
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