Washington State Department of Health High-Impact HIV Prevention and Surveillance Programs for Health Departments - In this application, the Washington State Department of Health (DOH) and Public Health Seattle-King County (PHSKC), the EHE jurisdiction, will continue to build on collaborative relationships with local health jurisdictions (LHJs), community-based organizations (CBOs), and healthcare system partners around the state to strengthen comprehensive patient-centered interventions to locate and treat persons with HIV disease and protect people at high risk of HIV infection while moving efforts toward a syndemic approach. DOH implements and proposes to expand and refine innovative data collection and data sharing systems at DOH and with partner agencies which will reinforce Data-to-Care (D2C) and HIV surveillance systems in collaboration with dynamic syndemic (HIV/STI/viral hepatitis) partner services, community-based testing and navigation, case management and peer navigation, and syringe services programs (SSPs). DOH and PHSKC propose to expand and integrate community engagement and mobilization and broad social and health systems transformation efforts designed to help HIV negative persons avoid acquiring HIV, ST Is, and viral hepatitis, and to ensure continuity of integrated care for persons living with HIV disease. DOH and PHSKC implement and will expand a variety of interventional disease surveillance strategies and activities for the purpose of early detection and reporting of HIV, identifying and minimizing transmission clusters, and maximizing viral suppression. In this application, DOH demonstrates continuing success implementing an HIV PrEP drug assistance program across the state, with support leveraging resources from local health jurisdictions, CBOs, LHJs, and research institutions. DOH and PHSKC highlight current progress implementing long-term goals to end the HIV epidemic in the state. Other outcomes of this project include increased response to clusters of newly identified cases to identify undiagnosed persons with HIV and link P WH and at-risk persons to prevention and care, enhancement of on-going patient monitoring and follow up capacity, and establishment and expansion of syndemic prevention services to address infectious diseases, drug overdose, health disparities, and social determinants of health. EHE funding will continue to support whole-person and status-neutral approaches to reducing HIV incidence prioritized in the King County EHE Plan. These efforts focus on persons living unhoused or unstably housed in north Seattle and south King County and persons from US-born Black MSM, Latinx MSM, and African-born communities. EHE funding supports walk-in access to HIV testing, PrEP, and HIV care services in these geographic areas, given increasing concentrations of EHE priority populations, higher rates of HIV, lower rates of viral suppression, and historically limited access to HIV prevention and care services. El--IE also supports and promotes HIV testing and PrEP in settings that regularly engage EHE priority populations, like jails, syringe services program sites, the PHSKC sexual health clinic, and targeted condom distribution sites. To foster wider system-level changes in the jurisdiction, King County's EHE program continues to support two county-wide health care system collaboratives, one that focuses on primary care within large health care organizations and one that concentrates on emergency departments (EDS). The collaboratives promote structural changes at the health care system level to improve identification of patients in need of HIV/STI prevention and care services and linkage to services such as HIV/STI testing and PrEP.
