Student Role:  

A central goal of HIV care is to help patients achieve HIV viral suppression to reduce HIV-associated morbidity/mortality and improve quality of life. Unfortunately, many people living with HIV face a host of psychosocial barriers to staying in HIV care. The Ryan White Program is a program that enables HIV care and support services for people who are un/under-insured. The Infectious Diseases Clinic at Emory University Hospital Midtown is looking for strategies to better support patients to stay engaged in HIV care. The practicum student will be tasked with calling patients in the Ryan White Program who missed appointments or who have fallen out-of-care to identify barriers to care and address them in real-time together with the patient’s clinical and mental health care teams and social support teams. The student will collect this data and make recommendations to Program Leadership on eliminating the barriers to care and reducing no show rates. 

Required Skills: 

Good communication skills, cultural humility and sensitivity, works well in teams, ability to keep a spreadsheet of patients contacted and results of call as well as analyzing the data and recommend corrective actions.