Yvette Calderon, MD, FACEP, understood health disparities from an early age. Born to Puerto Rican parents who raised her in New York, she saw firsthand how language barriers and a lack of access to health care disadvantaged her family and others in her unprivileged Manhattan neighborhood. That’s when her desire to help people was born, and that desire still motivates her.

Today Dr. Calderon is known for her research into HIV and Hepatitis C prevention, but she didn’t start off on an academic track. She was 10 years into being an attending physician when she realized that to make an impact on the problems she was seeing in her ED, she would need a better understanding of how to do research.

“I also knew that in order to solve some of these problems, it would need some assistance in terms of finances,” Dr. Calderon explained. “I would only get that if I had a skillset that the grants people would see and say, ‘Oh, okay, so she knows what she’s doing,’ and would take a chance on me.” She got a fellowship with the Hispanic Center of Excellence at Albert Einstein College of Medicine that kickstarted her long, successful research career.

In the early 90s, Dr. Calderon was working in the Bronx and was seeing a lot of end-stage HIV in the ED. She wanted to reach patients earlier in the course of their disease so she could make a bigger difference.

At the time, those who wanted to get tested for HIV had to go to receive an hour of counseling and then wait a week for their results. As the science was progressing into point-of-care testing, Dr. Calderon and her colleagues started testing different options for providing HIV counseling in the ED. Wanting to be unintrusive to the flow of the ED, they developed educational and counseling videos and translated them into the common languages of their ED patients. Videos explained why to get tested, how to talk to your partner about testing, contraceptive options and more, and they could be watched while waiting the 20 minutes to receive test results.

“It was actually better to do video counseling,” Dr. Calderon explained. “Patients understood it better, and it could be done in different languages, and they were getting consistent messaging.”

Her work was funded by the Department of Health for the first 7-8 years of the program, allowing them to expand their screenings to different access points in the community—the local pharmacy, dental clinics, etc. Not everyone was on board with her project because they thought it was outside the scope of the emergency care team. But Dr. Calderon’s problem-solving instincts were too strong to ignore, and she felt strongly that her community would really benefit from proactive screenings.