Routine HIV screening in all health care settings is considered a best practice by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), DHHS Ending the Epidemic Initiative, the New York State Blueprint to End the AIDS Epidemic, and is mandated by law in New York for all individuals over the age of 13 who receive hospital or primary care. Despite this, many patients are not screened for HIV during routine care, including in dental care settings, resulting in missed opportunities for identifying undiagnosed HIV infections, providing education for and linkage to PrEP, and linking and re-engaging HIV-positive patients into HIV care. The investigators will use information technology in the following two ways to support the delivery of HIV prevention and care best practices in the dental care setting to meet the DHHS Ending the HIV Epidemic (ETE) goals. First, Dental Teams will receive a Best Practice (BPA) alert whenever they have a patient who should be offered HIV testing. This BPA is linked to an order set to simplify ordering HIV tests and reporting results. Second, Dental teams will be contacted whenever they have a patient who is known to have HIV and is out of HIV care. A critical knowledge gap for implementing these ETE activities in the dental setting is whether comprehensive ETE efforts could be integrated into existing dental teams consisting of practitioners, dental assistants and hygienists or require augmentation by a dedicated care navigator. Therefore the investigators will pilot the Dental Team and Care Navigator models at two different dental sites (NYP-Columbia and NYP-Weill Cornell) using a cross-over design to evaluate acceptability and feasibility of providing HIV prevention and treatment services supported by these health IT strategies in the dental setting under these two care delivery models. If the strategies are found to be acceptable and feasible for both dental care patients and providers, then the study will expand to 4 sites and examine the effectiveness of these strategies for delivering HIV prevention and care best practices in the dental setting.
The purpose of this study is to use information technology (IT) to support the delivery of HIV prevention and care best practices in the dental care setting to meet the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Ending the HIV Epidemic (ETE) goals.