Session Title (limit 25
words) *
State of the Art Public Health Practices to Identify and Link HIV Positive to
High Quality Care in Health Departments
Session Description for
Review *
Many state and local health departments are seeking new opportunities
to adopt strategies shown in the broader healthcare system to improve
their capacity to locate, link, and retain individuals with communicable
and chronic diseases in high quality services. In this workshop, we provide
intensive training focusing on three strategies: data mining to locate
individuals with communicable and chronic diseases who are not in care,
integration of community health workers (CHWs) in multidisciplinary
clinical teams to ensure linkage and retention, and continuous quality
improvement (CQI) to improve performance of CHWs in assessing and
addressing personal and structural barriers to care. Workshop
participants will acquire new skills and practical techniques that can be
applied with other communicable disease and chronic care populations
served in public health settings. Workshop faculty will present
foundational training in the three strategies and demonstrate their
application in local health departments in three communities. City of
Houston, Texas staff will present an overview of data mining techniques
to identify and locate HIV positive individuals who are not in care by
mining commercial lab, public health surveillance, and commercial locator
databases. The trainer will address practical use of these databases, their
effectiveness in identifying individuals out of care, and accuracy in
providing locator information for public health workers to conduct field
investigations. City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania staff will describe the
effective design and management of multidisciplinary teams and methods
for integrating CHWs in the team. The trainer will discuss key skills,
training, and supervision required to ensure CHWs optimally contribute to
multidisciplinary teams. George Washington University and Fulton
County, Georgia staff will present CQI techniques to design performance
measures, conduct CQI chart reviews, analyze process and clinical
outcomes data to identify opportunities to improve quality and
performance, address performance deficiencies through training, and
undertake quality improvement projects to test new linkage processes.
The presenters will offer best practices and lessons learned from the
Merck Foundation HIV Care Collaborative (HCC) for Underserved
Populations in the US, which funds the design and evaluation of
replicable, innovative strategies in public health settings to improve
outcomes and prevent further HIV infections.
Session Description for
Publication (web,
conference program) *
Health departments seek strategies shown to be effective in the broader
healthcare system. The workshop addresses data mining to locate
individuals not in care, integrating community health workers in
multidisciplinary teams, and continuous quality improvement.
Foundational training and demonstrated applications in health
departments are offered.
Learning Objective 1:
At the conclusion of
this session, attendees
will be able to: *
Compare innovative ways to improve health care service capacity, remove
barriers to care, identify gaps in service, align scarce resources, use
information technologies to enhance patient interactions, share data,
track progress and bill, and improve overall service delivery.
Learning Objective 2:
At the conclusion of
this session, attendees
will be able to:
Discuss epidemiologic applications for traditional and emerging public
health issues such as communicable diseases, chronic diseases, injuries,
environmental hazards, etc. and effective strategies to minimize or
eliminate these public health threats.
Learning Objective 3:
At the conclusion of
this session, attendees
will be able to:
Collect methods to train and prepare a strong public health workforce to
carry out their roles and functions effectively and efficiently and potential
partners who can assist in delivering the necessary training and
education.