Montefiore Group, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Columbia University Medical Center land $3 million for HIV prevention

The National Institute of Mental Health has awarded $3 million to researchers at Montefiore Medical Group, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Columbia University Medical Center in an effort to curb HIV rates in the Bronx, a borough in New York with one of the highest HIV rates in the country.

The work calls for increasing the use of pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, a medication that reduces the risk of contracting HIV, by integrating PrEP into Montefiore primary care practices throughout the Bronx.

"Primary care providers are essential to ending the AIDS epidemic because they regularly reach people before they are infected," Laurie Bauman, co-principal investigator on the study and director of the Preventive Intervention Research Center at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said in a statement. "Our goal is to address reservations providers might have about prescribing PrEP, which include their own lack of training and their concerns about patient adherence." 

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The selection of Montefiore Medical Group's Federally Qualified Health Centers for the initiative puts the spotlight on Montefiore's expertise in developing models for treating diseases on a population basis, and its continuing collaboration with the New York City government to end the AIDS epidemic.

The randomized trial will involve six Montefiore Medical Group FQHCs. Three will receive the intervention, which will address diverse barriers to PrEP.

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The work will include developing a PrEP Eligibility Tool to help providers identify high-risk individuals who might be eligible for PrEP. Also, the program encourages providers to use the electronic medical record to screen, prescribe, monitor and communicate with patients and other clinicians about PrEP.

To evaluate the intervention, in fact, researchers will use electronic health record data to track the number of people screened and new PrEP prescriptions. They will also assess the effectiveness of each intervention component with qualitative studies of providers and patients who both embraced and opted not to initiate PrEP. 

This article first appeared in Healthcare IT News.

Twitter: @Bernie_HITN