About Us

Welcome to the VA National HIV/AIDS Website. The site is designed to be an informational and educational resource on HIV and AIDS for health care providers inside and outside the VA system, veterans, and the general public.

The site is a product of a collaboration between the VA's Public Health Strategic Health Care Group (PHSHG) and the Center for HIV Information (CHI) at the University of California San Francisco.

We hope the layout and navigation of the site allow for quick access to the materials you need. Please consult the Search engine (located in the top banner) or the Site Map for assistance. For details on the technologies we use, please read our Technology Accessibility Statement below.

Questions or feedback related to the site may be directed to the Web support staff via the Contact Us page.

The Center for HIV Information is a program of the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, which partners with government agencies, foundations, and international organizations to identify and develop information on HIV care, prevention, and policy. This information is disseminated to care providers, researchers, and policymakers nationally and worldwide through electronic media, including Internet and CD-ROM. CHI develops strategies for reaching those areas and individuals in greatest need of high-quality, practical information on HIV/AIDS. UCSF CHI's Advisory Board is chaired by Paul A. Volberding, MD.

Medical editors to HIV InSite, CHI's most prominent web site, also provide content to the VA HIV/AIDS web site. These medical editors are:

Oliver Bacon, MD

Oliver Bacon, an infectious disease specialist at UCSF Medical Center and the San Francisco VA Medical Center, cares for patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) at the UCSF Positive Health Practice. Bacon's clinical interests include general internal medicine, infectious disease, and HIV. In addition to caring for patients, he is pursuing research on the detection of early HIV infection in San Francisco and Brazil, on ways to incorporate HIV prevention into medical care, and on the use of Web-based clinical vignettes to evaluate training needs of HIV providers in resource-limited settings. Bacon also is a clinical instructor at UCSF.

Susa Coffey, MD

Susa Coffey is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF, and is an attending physician in the Positive Health Program at San Francisco General Hospital, San Francisco's largest Ryan White Care Act-funded HIV specialty clinic. Dr. Coffey was the founding coordinator of the Men of Color HIV/AIDS clinical program at UCSF, funded by the Office of Minority Health.

Ian McNicholl, Pharm.D., BCPS (Added Qualifications-Infectious Diseases)

Ian McNicholl is a Clinical Pharmacy Specialist with the UCSF Positive Health Program at San Francisco General Hospital and an Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy at UCSF. Dr. McNicholl is a board-certified pharmacotherapy specialist and has added qualifications in infectious diseases pharmacotherapy. Dr. McNicholl is responsible for providing expert review and commentary on HIV/AIDS antiretroviral drug interactions.

Our site is hosted on a Sun Enterprise 280R. Our production server is a Sun T2000. Both servers are running Sun Solaris 10, Orion version 2.0.5, the Lucene search engine, and Java 1.5.0_11.

CHI strives to connect with the largest audience possible and, at the same time, to take advantage of cutting-edge technology that provides maximum efficiency and flexibility. Our sites are "dynamic," meaning that information can be stored in one place but also can be easily presented at multiple locations and in different ways. While this makes the inner workings of our projects fairly complex, we aim for a clean, simple, and accessible exterior. We approach this goal in several ways.

• We attempt to comply with HTML 4.01 standards on our Web sites.
  Our content is accessible to people using older browsers.
• We manage site updates with an eye toward the latest browsers, protocols, and security alerts.
  Users have access to the latest versions of our files, regardless of their personal browser versions or settings.
• We minimize the use of JavaScript and unnecessary images.
  Our sites work well with slower connections and older computers.
• We appreciate feedback from users as to what works for them and what doesn't.