A bill recently introduced in the California legislature (AB1534) seeks to better integrate HIV treatment with primary care by requiring state-regulated health insurance plans to permit HIV specialists to be primary care providers if the HIV specialist requests primary care provider status and meets the health plan’s eligibility criteria for all specialists seeking primary care provider status. Our results confirm that patients treated by providers we deemed to be HIV specialists are more likely to receive guideline-consistent HIV care and are equally if not more likely to receive primary preventive services as compared to patients treated by non-specialists. Even among patients seen regularly by their providers, patients with HIV specialists received preventive and primary care at similar or higher levels than patients of non-specialists.
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