Tyler Bartholomew and Shashi Kapadia, MD, MS Awarded Fourth Cycle of CHERISH Pilot Grant Funding

Tyler Bartholomew is a doctoral student in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Miami. Prior to entering the doctoral program, he was the project manager for an HIV and HCV testing, linkage to care, and treatment program at five federally-qualified health centers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as part of his AmeriCorps service. For his pilot grant, he will conduct an economic analysis of Florida’s Infectious Disease Elimination Act (IDEA) Syringe Exchange Program located in Miami. Using clinical data from IDEA Exchange participants, he will estimate the costs of the IDEA fixed syringe exchange program and the mobile syringe exchange program from the healthcare and societal perspectives. He will also estimate the cost of ancillary services such as naloxone distribution and an onsite wound care clinic. The results of his pilot study will support the evaluation of broader implementation of syringe exchange services across the state Florida.

Dr. Shashi Kapadia is an instructor in Medicine and in Healthcare Policy & Research at Weill Cornell Medicine; he previously completed an Infectious Diseases Fellowship, a Public Health and General Preventive Medicine Residency, and his Masters of Science in Clinical Investigation at Weill Cornell. In his pilot grant, he will use a national administrative dataset to characterize changes in the Hepatitis C (HCV) provider landscape, comparing the period before direct acting antivirals (DAAs) and after DAAs. Using this dataset, he will assess the changes in the number and types of providers offering HCV-testing and treatment, examine the HCV testing and treatment volume across providers, and compare the rate of treatment completion for patients treated by providers with different volumes. He will evaluate results for all HCV patients and for HCV patient subgroups with opioid use disorder diagnoses and with HIV co-infection.