HIV

Every week, The American Journal of Managed Care® recaps the top managed care news of the week, and you can now listen to it on our podcast, Managed Care Cast.

HIV care delivery has always had an ethos in it of really being based on a team-based approach, explained Stella A. Safo, MD, assistant professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

This week, the top managed care news included the Community Oncology Alliance submitting an alternative to the Oncology Care Model; more study results demonstrating diabetes drugs can prevent renal failure; US task force recommending pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV prevention.

The United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has issued 2 recommendation statements including 3 grade A recommendations for the use of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV prevention and HIV screening in adults, adolescents, and pregnant women.

During the Center for Strategic & International Studies’ event “HIV/AIDS in the Unites States: The Road to 2030,” Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Robert Redfield, MD, director, CDC, joined to explain why the country is ready and able to end the epidemic from both a policy and clinical perspective.

Enhanced care coordination in New York City that leveraged surveillance data with a health plan’s Medicaid managed care roster improved its HIV viral load suppression rate.

People living with HIV are generally at 1.5- to 2-fold higher risk for cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), including heart attacks, strokes, and heart failure, and they often face barriers to accessing care.

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is one of the best interventions we have for preventing and stopping HIV transmission, explained Stella A. Safo, MD, assistant professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Nearly 10% of people living with HIV have to travel more than an hour to access HIV care, and those living in rural counties have drive times more than double that of those in urban counties.

From the health system perspective, there needs to be improvement in treating HIV as a comprehensive disease that now goes into aging, explained Stella A. Safo, MD, assistant professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

After a rural syringe service program was indefinitely suspended, individuals who inject drugs had a greater risk of contracting HIV and hepatitus C virus.

A study examined how biomarkers of microbial translocation and innate immune activation were affected by HIV status, HCV co-infection, and alcohol use.

Stubborn racial disparities mean that the rate of new HIV inections was 93% higher among black women than it would have been if the rate were the same as white women.

US birth rates have declined for the fourth year in a row; Gilead's chief executive officer (CEO) is expected to testify before a House committee about Truvada pricing; nonprofit generic drug company Civica Rx has chosen the first 2 antibiotics that it will produce.

HHS has announced that Gilead will donate its pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) pill Truvada for up to 200,000 people in a multiyear agreement, just a day after the pharma giant announced that a generic version of the pill will come to market a year early. However, some activists are skeptic.

Researchers from the University of Buffalo surveyed pharmacist students, finding high awareness of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and generally positive attitudes towards it. However, the survey also revelaed gaps in knowledge, highlighting the need for more education.

Findings from PARTNER2 show that HIV-positive individuals who were virally suppressed by antiretroviral therapy had no risk of transmitting the virus by having sex without condoms.

As we move away from a system of external development grants that help us maintain our HIV models to a system where our returns on investment support the work that we do, there’s a concern that there will be some slimming down of services that get patients in to our practice, explained Stella A. Safo, MD, assistant professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

The World Health Organization recommends little to no screen time for children under age 5; senators urge HHS to ensure that government patents on the HIV prevention drug Truvada are properly licensed; New York City health officials have confirmed 31 new cases of measles in less than a week.

A new study has identified lower rates of sexual anxiety among gay and bisexual men taking pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).

In a study of 29 virally suppressed patients who discontinued antiretroviral therapy (ART), every patient was able to maintain viral suppression from infusions of an antibody that blocks the HIV-binding site on CD4+ T cells.

In rare cases, despite being on antiretroviral therapy and being virally suppressed, patients experience extreme immune decline.

A new immunotherapy approach was found to both expose HIV concealed within CD4+ T cells and kill it, which could potentially lead to an eventual vaccine for the virus.

Dozens of doctors and other medical professionals have been charged with exchanging opioids and other drugs for sex and cash; the first 2 patients in the United States have been treated with CRISPR; doctors have cured infants of immunodeficiency syndrome using gene therapy made from HIV.

Prevalence of depressive symptoms among individuals with HIV may lead to an increased risk of mortality.