Dr. White's research expands to include HIV prevention and HIV treatment

Dr. Douglas White, Senior Scientist at the Levitt Center, was awarded a 2-year grant from the California Department of Public Health to implement the Emergency Department Starting Antiretroviral Treatment (ED-StART) Program, an innovative model integrating immediate ART for ED patients who are newly diagnosed with HIV infection. He has also been awarded funding to integrate comprehensive HIV prevention services into his highly successful HIV screening program, which includes identifying HIV negative patients who might benefit from pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) treatment. Dr. White also continues to participate in the DETECT trial, a multi-centered, National Institutes of Health clinical trial, evaluating HCV screening outcomes in U.S. emergency departments.

This year, the results of the HIV Tested Trial, one of the largest clinical trials ever conducted in emergency medicine and the largest ED-based HIV screening trial to date (of which the Highland ED was one of the four implementation sites), was published in JAMA Open Network. Dr. White’s collaboration with colleagues from Denver Health and the University of Colorado Medical Center resulted in two publications stemming from their work systematically evaluating PrEP eligibility and patient knowledge of PrEP (AIDS Patient Care and STD) as well as the development of a PrEP risk assessment tool (American Journal of Emergency Medicine). Dr. White also co-authored a paper along with Highland colleagues which was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome studying the utility of signal-to-cutoff ratios of rapid HIV tests to predict the likelihood of HIV confirmation. He has recently submitted the preliminary results of the ED-StART initiative to an international AIDS meeting scheduled for early 2022.