Materials and Links

Background

The 2008 National Summit on HIV Diagnosis, Prevention, and Access to Care (November 19-21, 2008, Arlington, VA) is sponsored by the Forum for Collaborative HIV Research in partnership with the American Academy of HIV Medicine, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HIV Medicine Association, Human Resources and Services Administration, Kaiser Permanente, National Black Gay Men's Advocacy Coalition, the Office of AIDS Research-NIH, and the Veterans Administration.

The purpose of the 2008 National HIV Summit is to support the continued implementation of the CDC's recommendations for routine HIV testing in an effort to get patients enrolled into care earlier and to maximize prevention opportunities.

The program is being developed under the leadership of the co-chairs Dr. John G Bartlett (Johns Hopkins University) and Dr. Kenneth Mayer (Brown University) and the Scientific Planning Committee representing governmental agencies, professional societies, academia, clinical care, community and advocacy organizations and the pharmaceutical sector. The program will consist of plenary sessions at the beginning and end of the conferences. Separate tracks in Prevention, Testing, Access to Care, and Measuring Outcomes of HIV Testing Efforts will allow in-depth discussion of these topics.

The 2008 Summit is the second gathering of its kind, following on the 2006 National Summit on New Opportunities for HIV Diagnosis, Prevention and Access to Care (November 29-30, 2006 in Washington, DC), which brought together the national leadership in clinical care, research and policy from government and governmental agencies; academia and clinical care; patient advocacy and community organizations; and industry. The 2006 National Summit was organized with the goal to discuss and evaluate the 2006 CDC recommendations for opt-out HIV testing, and develop strategies to implement them, with a special emphasis on the need to link testing to prevention and access to care opportunities. The major outcomes of the 2006 National Summit were published in a special supplement to Clinical Infectious Diseases (CID 2007; 45 Suppl. 4) as well as CME materials.

It is now time to reconvene all the major players to consider the extent to which the recommendations have been implemented at the national, state and local levels; the barriers (policy, financial or otherwise) that still exist preventing and/or discouraging their implementation and ways to overcome these; what models we have for improving HIV diagnosis in spite of barriers; and what this all means for the improved care and outcome of the US HIV-infected populations. This is a unique opportunity for evaluating the status of the US epidemic, for developing short and long-term strategies for better control of the domestic epidemic, and for improving the identification of all HIV-infected individuals and ensuring optimal access to care.

The project is supported by unrestricted educational grants from Gilead Sciences, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Kaiser Permanente, Merck, Boehringer Ingelheim, Abbott Pharmaceuticals, Bio-Rad, Inverness Medical Innovations, Gen-Probe, and OraSure Technologies.

Objectives:

Goals and Objectives of the 2008 Summit:

To assess the current impact of recommendations to implement routine HIV testing on policy, program and practice at the local, state and federal level.

• What has changed and where are the remaining barriers?
• What have we learned from pilots, models and demonstration programs?
• What metrics will inform monitoring and evaluation?
• How do we ensure continuing progress and where do we project to be in 2010?

Status:

The 2008 Summit was held November 19-21, 2008 in Arlington, VA

Planning Committee Members: