PrEPline Provides Clinicians with Advice on New HIV Prevention Tool

A new telephone consultation service was launched earlier this month to provide free, expert advice to clinicians across the United States about pre-exposure prophylaxis, is staffed with an expert team of HIV providers—including physicians, nurses, and clinical pharmacists. These experts can assist clinicians who call in with the following: identifying patients for whom PrEP would (or would not) be appropriate, advising on the safe administration of PrEP, sharing information about protocols and best practices for laboratory evaluations, follow-up, and adherence; and outlining additional prevention strategies that can be employed to reduce the risk of HIV acquisition.

The PrEPline is a service of the Clinician Consultation Center (CCC)Exit Disclaimer is part of the Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) AIDS Education and Training Centers (AETCs) ProgramExit Disclaimer. The new PrEPline was made possible through supplemental funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to this HRSA program that provides education and training to clinicians nationally.

As the Center observed in announcing the launch of the PrEPline, this new service for clinicians helps advance the National HIV/AIDS Strategy’s, Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and Director of the CCC. “We will guide these clinicians as they work through decisions about who might benefit from PrEP and for whom it’s not advisable to prescribe PrEP, how to provide follow-up to ensure safe medication use, and protocols for averting and identifying new transmissions. Key to PrEP will be continually evaluating patients’ ability to adhere to a daily PrEP regimen, as missed doses can negate the benefits of PrEP.”