The mission of the Center to Improve Veteran Involvement in Care (CIVIC), located at VA Portland Health Care System (VAPORHCS), is to conduct research that empowers Veterans to improve their health through engagement in self-care, engagement with VA and non-VA healthcare systems, and engagement in health services research. This mission supports several VHA 2018-2024 strategic objectives including empowering Veterans to improve their health and to make healthcare decisions by ensuring transparency of information, and emphasizing Veterans’ and their families’ whole health and wellness. Secretary Shulkin’s 2018 Five Priorities for VA reaffirm the importance of creating new processes and systems that support Veteran-centric decision-making around care and care settings. CIVIC proposes six main goals and two focus areas. The first goal (Focused Area 1) is to conduct research that helps Veterans with mental health conditions, including pain, improve their health and safety. This focus area includes research on suicide prevention, the use of prescription opioids, and optimization of non-opioid pain care—these topics are also high priorities in VHA. The second goal (Focused Area 2) is to conduct research that helps Veterans, their supports, and their clinicians create and sustain effective healthcare relationships. Additional CIVIC goals are to 3) support additional high value, innovative research that falls outside of our focused areas; 4) collaborate with a diverse set of stakeholders including Veterans to enhance research and build bridges between innovation and evidence; 5) further develop CIVIC expertise in dissemination and implementation; and 6) support career development of promising junior and established investigators to build health services research capacity. CIVIC's Operational Partners are the Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention; Office of Patient Centered Care and Cultural Transformation; Pain Management; VISN-20; and VAPORHCS. Veteran stakeholders provide ongoing feedback about CIVIC operations and directions through our Veteran Engagement Group. Each of CIVIC’s 19 Core investigators is a faculty member of VAPORHCS’s primary academic affiliate, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). CIVIC’s Director is Steven Dobscha MD, and its Associate Director is Linda Ganzini MD, MPH. Guided by its Steering Committee (which includes Operations partners, two Veterans, and representatives from OHSU and other Centers of Innovation) and CIVIC’s Executive Committee, CIVIC will, over the next five years, capitalize on several areas of methodologic and content expertise to achieve its strategic goals. These areas of strength include use of mixed-methods research; acquisition and synthesis of information from multiple stakeholders; expertise in understanding Veterans’ healthcare experiences; evidence synthesis; Veteran engagement in research; suicide prevention; opioids, pain and substance use disorder; lung cancer; and the use of technology t...