NIH grant: PREP-TALK: Transforming Hospitalization into a PrEP Engagement Opportunity for People Who Use Drugs (1RM1DA066198-01)

retained text

NIH grant 1RM1DA066198-01: PREP-TALK: Transforming Hospitalization into a PrEP Engagement Opportunity for People Who Use Drugs
Institute: {'code': 'DA', 'abbreviation': 'NIDA', 'name': 'National Institute on Drug Abuse', 'admin_org_id': '12500072', 'admin_funding_url': ''}. PI: Julia L. Marcus. Award: $2066706.
Start: 2026-08-01T00:00:00.
PROJECT SUMMARY
People who use drugs (PWUD), such as opioids and stimulants, are at increased risk for HIV. Pre-exposure
prophylaxis (PrEP) is a highly effective and safe medication available in pills or long-acting injectable form
which reduces the risk of HIV. However, current norms confine PrEP prescribing to outpatient settings. This
creates a gap in care for PWUD who have low uptake of PrEP and are often disconnected from outpatient
healthcare systems. Hospitalization has emerged as a critical touchpoint to engage PWUD in multiple aspects
of preventative healthcare but has not been previously examined as an access point for PrEP. Successfully
integrating PrEP into inpatient care requires systematic implementation strategies that address multilevel
barriers and facilitators within hospital systems. There is an urgent need to develop, implement and test
systems for integrating PrEP prescriptions into hospital workflows, discharge planning, and linkage to
community resources for long-term follow-up. In response to RM1 Funding Opportunity DA-25-060, our team of
six MPIs will leverage four geographically and demographically diverse hospital sites in Boston, St. Louis,
Chapel Hill and San Francisco to shift the paradigm of HIV prevention for PWUD by moving PrEP from a
purely outpatient consideration to a routine part of inpatient care. We will use a Consolidated Framework for
Implementation Research to methodically introduce academic detailing, an evidence-based educational
strategy that uses trained health professionals to deliver targeted outreach to clinicians, to support the uptake
of PrEP prescribing best practices. We hypothesize that an academic detailing toolkit, informed by community
preferences and optimized through human-centered design can shift the paradigm of HIV prevention for
PWUD by leveraging the strategic positioning of the hospital as an accessible healthcare node to screen for
HIV and initiate PrEP, increasing retention in PrEP care. In Aim 1, we will develop, refine and pilot an inpatient
PrEP academic detailing toolkit entitled PrEP-Talk. We will utilize participatory human-centered design
workshops with a multi-tiered Community Advisory Board (CAB) comprising clinicians and PWUD to co-create
toolkit components, including academic detailing training, clinician and peer education, and patient-facing
materials. In Aim 2 we will evaluate the effectiveness of PrEP-Talk on PrEP uptake among hospitalized PWUD,
and in Aim 3 we will evaluate implementation outcomes of PrEP-Talk. Our findings have the potential to
identify a novel intervention and methodology to increase PrEP uptake and retention in a population where
need remains high, providing a scalable, evidence-based pathway to end the HIV epidemic.

document fetched 2026-08-08 06:51