Programs & Partnerships

The Levitt Center and the Colorado Social Emergency Medicine Collaborative (“CSEMC”) have joined forces to expand the practice of social emergency medicine (SEM) to a broader health community, including hospitals, community partners, social workers, emergency services providers and other stakeholders in Colorado and California.

Explore new approaches to old problems with an understanding that many of the diseases we treat are merely symptoms of a greater societal disease.

The Levitt Center is proud to continue our commitment to workforce diversitythrough our collaboration with the Stanford Medicine Office of Diversity in MedicalEducation (ODME), and the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute (CVI) as part of theHealthcare Education, Access and Leadership (HEAL) initiative generouslysupported by the Gilead Foundation.

The Levitt Center and Georgetown Massive Data Institute are working together on Data Bridge, a project to bring secure and open source data sharing software to social emergency medicine patients, particularly those experiencing homelessness. Our first use case is to enable government and nonprofit agencies to exchange data to deliver CalAIM services.

Our externship program helps to foster and increase the diversity of the next generation of social emergency medicine practitioners.

Dr. Douglas White, Senior Scientist at the Levitt Center and his great team are continuing their work on emergency department (ED) based screening and HIV prevention with the implementation and expansion of their ED HIV PrEP Program, funded by a Gilead FOCUS grant.

The Levitt Center is leading the HOUSED study, funded by the California Health Care Foundation, to examine ED use patterns among patients facing housing challenges. Phase 1 at Highland Hospital challenges assumptions about when unhoused patients seek care, while future phases will expand social needs screening and integrate national data.

Dr. Amelia Breyre’s work on EMS care for patients with serious illness in the out-of-hospital setting. Focusing to improve care in communities that are typically marginalized in their access to hospice and palliative care.

Program to improve palliative care for ED patients focusing on a sustainable palliative care curriculum to ensure emergency medicine residents have the necessary tools to help the most vulnerable patients and their families.

The Levitt Center’s opioid treatment program, launched through Dr. Herring’s EDBRIDGE grant, has expanded to over 52 California hospitals and is now the focus of a large retrospective study on ED-initiated buprenorphine treatment at Highland Hospital.

Dr. Andrew Herring’s ED-BRIDGE program, funded by SAMHSA, integrated emergency departments into California’s MAT Expansion Project, providing 24/7 access to buprenorphine for opioid use disorder and later evolving into CA-Bridge.

The relationship between alcohol use and intimate partner violence is well-established but little understood. To help move the field forward, the Levitt Center has partnered as a subawardee with the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation to perform a mixed-methods study of drinking contexts -- where, when and with whom -- and how such contexts influence partner abuse patterns. This is a five year project, and will involve in-depth interviews of dozens of patients and surveys of hundreds.

The Levitt Center is evaluating a tablet-based Domestic Violence Reporting and Referral tool that streamlines mandatory reporting and connects victims with law enforcement and advocates.

Dr. Doug White and Dr. Erik Anderson are expanding their leading ED-based HIV and HCV screening program across Alameda Health System, integrating it into EPIC to enhance diagnosis, rapid testing, and linkage to care across Alameda County.

The Levitt Center for Social Emergency Medicine, in collaboration with the Emergency Medicine Foundation and the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), received funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to conduct a consensus conference to establish the intellectual underpinnings and future direction of Social Emergency Medicine.

The Levitt Center is a subawardee in a multi-center trial led by Denver Health, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Cincinnati to enhance ED-based HIV screening, a strategy pioneered by Dr. Doug White over a decade ago.

Health Advocates, a partnership between the Levitt Center and Alameda Health System, connects low-income patients with social, economic, and legal resources to improve health outcomes and reduce emergency room utilization.

Dr. White and his team have expanded their successful ED-based HIV screening program to include hepatitis C, aiming to identify and connect more patients to curative treatment. Their work has advanced the efficient use of emergency care to detect undiagnosed Hep C in high-risk populations.

The Health Coach Program trains local youth to support ED patients with diabetes and hypertension through education, follow-ups, and care navigation, with its impact being evaluated in a Levitt Center-led randomized trial.

The objective of this project is to increase access to medically assisted treatment of opioid addiction through initiating treatment in the emergency department. The project will pilot a treatment model, proven successful in a controlled academic environment, in an urban region, and share the results in CHCF and peer-reviewed publications.

The Levitt Center collaborates with Bay Area agencies and researchers to improve emergency care for trafficked children and supports statewide policy efforts through the HEAT Institute.

Dr. Jocelyn Freeman Garrick secured funding to expand the Alameda County Health Pipeline Partnership, aiming to diversify the health workforce through community collaboration, youth recruitment, trauma-informed care, and standardized best practices.

The Levitt Center, in collaboration with UC Berkeley, conducted a neighborhood-level study in Oakland showing that greater racial and ethnic diversity is linked to lower violent injury rates, particularly in predominantly African American and Hispanic communities.

It is a truism that guns and drugs don't mix, but in certain social settings they appear to be inextricable. This small exploratory study, in collaboration with toxicologists and emergency physicians at the University of California, Fresno and anthropologists at aims to understand the interplay between the substances that gun-injured patients believe they use and why, as well as what is actually in their bloodstream at the time of their injury.

This study explores the feasibility of detecting undiagnosed diabetes in the emergency department using random capillary glucose to better allocate primary care resources to high-risk patients.