CDC’s Prevention Epicenters (PE) Program is a unique research program in which CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion (DHQP) collaborates with academic investigators to conduct innovative infection control and prevention research.

DHQP began the PE Program in 1997 as a way to work directly with academic partners to address important scientific questions regarding the prevention of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), antibiotic resistance, and other adverse events associated with healthcare. Through a cooperative agreement mechanism, DHQP works with a network of academic centers to foster research on the epidemiology and prevention of HAI. The program has provided a unique forum in which academic leaders in healthcare epidemiology can partner directly with each other and with CDC subject matter experts to conduct innovative research designed to fill knowledge gaps that are most important from a public health perspective. Because the PE investigators work together as a group, there is an emphasis on multicenter collaborative research projects, many of which would not be possible for a single academic center. The knowledge created through the PE Program has been extremely valuable to the field, and has resulted in over 150 publications in peer-reviewed journals on a wide variety of HAI prevention topics.