The following is a summary of the “Characteristics of California Emergency Departments in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-Designated HIV Priority Counties,” published in the January 2023 issue of Emergency Medicine by Bennett, et al.

There is now a regional emphasis on national HIV testing initiatives. Using California as an example, we aimed to determine which local EDs might be the best places to focus future HIV testing efforts. A retrospective look at emergency rooms, ER doctors, and the patients they treated in California, along with county-level estimates of HIV prevalence and poverty rates. Specifically, they focused on describing EDs that are part of academic medical centers in counties designated as HIV priority by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Of the 320 EDs analyzed, 178 were in designated “priority counties,” 29 were associated with academic medical centers, and 24 had both features. There were 12,869,889 emergency department visits, with 61.8% occurring in priority counties, 14.7% in EDs affiliated with teaching hospitals, and 12.0% in EDs with both characteristics. Overall median visit volumes and visits by at-risk and CDC-targeted populations (such as the homeless, people who identified as Black or African American race, and people who identified as Hispanic or Latino ethnicity, all P< 0.01) were higher in the subset of EDs in priority counties with teaching hospital affiliations than in the priority and nonpriority county ED groups without a teaching hospital affiliation.

Among the most important places to seek medical attention in California are the emergency rooms of the universities that serve the state’s priority counties. These EDs primarily treat people from communities hit harder by HIV. Testing efforts would be most productively focused on these sections. Increasing HIV testing in these EDs has the potential to lessen the state of California’s undiagnosed HIV epidemic.

Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0736467922006461