Delivering Services to People with AIDS and HIV

Home- and Community-Based Services

During the 1990s, new approaches to treating AIDS helped to prolong people's lives, and the need for long-term supportive services increased. As a result, the focus shifted away from acute care to care provided in home and community settings.

We developed a research agenda for studying the status of home- and community-based service use by people with AIDS (including the demand for and supply of services and innovative service delivery approaches). In identifying the challenges that health care providers, planners, and policymakers face in dealing with the changing epidemic, we identified a pressing need for better information about service use and costs to deal with an environment increasingly dominated by cost control, concrete strategies for implementing managed care for people with AIDS, and a cohesive policy to address the health care needs of people with all types of chronic illnesses. This study was funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation.

Click here for the executive summary from "Serving a Changing Population: Home and Community-Based Services for People with AIDS."

Involving Family Planning Clinics in Improving Services

We studied the feasibility of developing a clinically useful method (or "risk index") for identifying clients of Title X family planning clinics who are at higher risk of acquiring HIV, and who should therefore be referred for HIV counseling and testing. After a literature review, we concluded that the index probably would be of limited usefulness. The study was conducted for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Population Affairs.

As a followup, we helped the Office of Population Affairs understand how its regional offices perceive HIV integration messages coming from the central office. We also summarized the research on the effectiveness of clinician-delivered messages in reducing HIV risks and risky health behaviors in general.

Back to Top