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. This was best exemplified by our rapid ability to set up Covid-19 community testing, with a special emphasis on reaching vulnerable populations. Total funding for EIP services over the past two decades exceeds $20 million with hundreds of thousands of individuals served by various component programs.

As the EIP has grown over time, 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 the space of substance use disorder screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment and/or other social service resources (I.e., the SBIRT model). Our EIP now works collaboratively with a dedicated substance use disorder (SUD) team. 

• Primary disease focus have grown to include HIV, Hepatitis C, substance use and 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, care coordination, other infectious diseases and victims of human trafficking.

The Early Intervention Program (EIP) consists of EM faculty members, program managers, linkage coordinators, Peer Recovery Specialists and health promotion advocates. This provides additional services to enhance Emergency Department (ED) care provided by the ED. All EIP staff are highly trained in principles of cultural competence and evidence-based counseling techniques.