The Early Intervention Program

The Early Intervention Program (EIP) was launched in 1998 as a health department funded HIV counseling and testing program operating within the ED.

EIP Mission:The UC Early Intervention Program is committed to identifying and intervening with populations most at risk for threats to health and well-being at the earliest opportunity, and helping these individuals connect with community resources to improve health outcomes. The EIP provides HIV prevention counseling and testing, as well as screening and intervention services for mental health and substance use disorders.

This was the first ever example of:

• Health department funding for an ED to implement a health promotion intervention
• Sustained ED implementation of a prevention service on an ongoing clinical basis.

The EIP is the department’s platform for experiential education, clinical research, and clinical practice/operations in population health and health promotion. The size and maturity of the EIP means that infrastructure is in place to directly accommodate or rapidly develop any population health priority for which there is funding and/or interest. Total funding for EIP services over the past two decades exceeds $20 million with hundreds of thousands of individuals served by various component programs.

Currently the EIP involves approximately four faculty members, program coordinators, and a variable number of core service staff. The EIP integrates a separate workforce of adjunct health professionals (e.g., health promotion advocates, linkage coordinators, addiction counselors, peer-support specialists) into the ED and expands services provided by usual ED staff (e.g., nurses, physicians/advanced practice providers, social workers). All EIP staff are highly trained in principles of cultural competence, health equity, and evidence-based counseling techniques.

As the EIP has grown overtime, it has expanded from ED-based infectious disease screening to include a broad array of interventions targeted at a variety of social determinants of health. A natural outgrowth of this process was expansion into substance use disorder screening and referral to treatment and/or other social service resources. Our EIP now works collaboratively alongside a dedicated Substance Use Disorder (SUD) team.

>Primary disease foci have grown to include HIV, Hepatitis C, substance use and mental health disorders, along with the tremendous breadth of social determinants of health (e.g., housing, job assistance, social networks, food insecurity, sex-work and violence).

>Emerging focus areas include resource utilization, primary care coordination, diabetes, hypertension, tuberculosis, influenza, sexually transmitted infections, victims of human trafficking, and most recently a massive effort in community-wide COVID-19 response.

EIP

Ryane Sickles, EIP Program Manager

Robert Braun, Data Manager

Lindsey Molloy, CICIP Program Manager

Derek Chitevke, EDCC Program Manager

Rasha Alsheyyab, Data Analyst

Jessika Bass, Peer Supervisor/Linkage Lead

Chloe Striker

Elysia Smith, HPA Lead

Kaylee Lacalameto

Sydney Floyd

Chase Heflin

Marina Rodriguez

Elrico Cornwall

Neria Brempong

Rachel Kombo

Noah McGorry

Joseph Fiorelli

Peers Support Specialists

Megan Massey-Besterman

Lawrence Justice

La’Ticia Roden

Lauren Duba

Health Promotion Advocates (HPA)

University of Cincinnati Students/Interns