We propose an extension of the embedded boundary method known as "shifted boundary method" to elliptic diffusion equations in mixed form (e.g., Darcy flow, heat diffusion problems with rough coefficients, etc.). Our aim is to obtain an improved formulation that, for linear finite elements, is at least second-order accurate for both flux and primary variable, when either Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions are applied. Following previous work of Nishikawa and Mazaheri in the context of residual distribution methods, we consider the mixed form of the diffusion equation (i.e., with Darcy-type operators), and introduce an enrichment of the primary variable. This enrichment is obtained exploiting the relation between the primary variable and the flux variable, which is explicitly available at nodes in the mixed formulation. The proposed enrichment mimics a formally quadratic pressure approximation, although only nodal unknowns are stored, similar to a linear finite element approximation. We consider both continuous and discontinuous finite element approximations and present two approaches: a non-symmetric enrichment, which, as in the original references, only improves the consistency of the overall method; and a symmetric enrichment, which enables a full error analysis in the classical finite element context. Combined with the shifted boundary method, these two approaches are extended to high-order embedded computations, and enable the approximation of both primary and flux (gradient) variables with second-order accuracy, independently on the type of boundary conditions applied. We also show that the the primary variable is third-order accurate, when pure Dirichlet boundary conditions are embedded. similar indicator function. The main idea behind the IBM is to solve the model equations on the entire domain, and to impose the boundary conditionss via a forcing term. The method was originally designed on Cartesian grids and its development has been an active field of research for some decades now. Two exhaustive reviews were written by Mittal and Iaccarino in 2005 [34], and Sotiropoulos and Yang in 2014 [47]. The main drawback of the IBM is the accuracy of boundary conditions, which are most often only first-order accurate. Some strategies have been proposed in the past to increase the IBM accuracy, at the expense of more involved implementations [18,17,26,27], or to compensate low-order accuracy by means of mesh adaptation [38,6,19].A similar objective is pursued by Embedded Boundary Methods, which still use an immersed description of bodies and boundaries, but solve the model equations only in the regions of interest. Within a finite element context, the cut-cell and cutFEM approach [39,15,20,10,24,48] are most commonly utilized. These techniques usually combine a weak enforcement of the boundary conditions with a XFEM strategy. For example, in CutFEMs, the boundary is reconstructed as the intersection between the boundary surface and the embedding (underlaying) grid. Approaches of this kind often require complex...