We are pleased to announce that Stanford Psychiatry’s Mark McGovern, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, is part of a team that has received a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to research a novel mobile pharmacy and clinic healthcare delivery model with community health workers for prevention, care and treatment of HIV and substance use. Dr. McGovern is joined by co-principal investigators Sandra Ann Springer (Contact, Yale), Jillian Corbin (St. Vincent de Paul Place), Gregg Gonsalves (Yale), and David Kline (Wake Forest).
There have been numerous recent outbreaks of HIV among people who use drugs, creating a converging public health crisis. No single prevention or treatment approach will end the HIV epidemic among people who use drugs, requiring new ways to bring services directly to people where they are. This inspired the creation of the first legalized mobile pharmacy and clinic health system in the U.S., staffed with community health workers, as one such strategy. However, knowing exactly where to go and how people will use services is still a vexing problem. The team leading this study, called “GEO IMPACT,” pursues an overarching goal: Can a learning public health system be developed to increase reach and access to care for people who use drugs and who are living with or at risk for HIV?
With an innovative collaboration of state health agencies, community groups, and researchers, the study team will identify the population living with or at-risk for HIV and quantify the magnitude of need for prevention and treatment services using modeling techniques. They will then align the need with access to services, deploying mobile pharmacy and clinics to these areas and evaluating their impacts compared with matched communities on outcomes.
Within the meta-framework of the Implementation Logic Model (ILM), Dr. McGovern’s team, led by Elena Rosenberg-Carlson, will examine how the modeling information and the mobile pharmacy and clinics interventions are working. Using mixed methods approaches, they will evaluate contextual determinants (barriers and facilitators) that mediate or moderate the achievement of these goals, the implementation strategies designed to achieve them, and if and how these implementation outcomes are being achieved. With each subsequent phase, the study team will use these data to make iterative adaptations and improvements.
“GEO IMPACT assembles a highly specialized and qualified team, committed together on this shared and unified mission,” says the team leading this project. “To meet an ambitious goal of developing a learning public health system to increase reach and access to care for people who use drugs who are living with or at risk for HIV, GEO IMPACT will use innovative modeling techniques to optimize service delivery, eliminate access barriers via a unique mobile pharmacy clinic, and use cutting-edge implementation science methods to inform and iteratively improve the impact of modeling and the MPC to improve outcomes for persons with HIV, HCV, and substance use disorders.”
Dr. McGovern's primary focus is the implementation and sustainment of evidence-based interventions and guideline-adherent care in public and private health care systems and organizations. Within the hub of the Stanford Center for Dissemination and Implementation (CDI), which he directs, Dr. McGovern leads multiple national implementation research and practice centers. Recent publications related to this work include “A tool to evaluate the integration of implementation science methods in a research project: The Dissemination and Implementation Research Capability Self Survey (DIRC-SS)”, published in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Science and “What is necessary for implementation science to actually improve the state of addiction treatment and research?” published in the Journal of Substance Use and Addiction Treatment.
More Information
For more details about this project, visit NIH RePORTER.