Legal/Policy Toolkit for Adoption and Implementation of Expedited Partner (2011)
From 2005-2007, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collaborated with the Centers for Law and the Public’s Health at Georgetown and John Hopkins Universities to complete the first phase of a public health initiative to aid state and local governments to implement Expedited Partner Therapy (EPT). EPT is the clinical practice of treating the sex partners of patients diagnosed with an STD, such as gonorrhea or chlamydia, without clinical assessment of the partners in order to quickly curtail further transmission.
In 2010, CDC, working with PHLP, began a second phase of this project. Principal investigator James G. Hodge, Jr. and his PHLP colleagues were tasked with providing assistance to states who are interested in adopting statutes or regulations that permit EPT as well as those who have already adopted these regulations but needed help implementing them. The final deliverable is a Toolkit providing a resource for voluntary use by state and local government officials. It includes sample state legislative language, a discussion of selected issues related to practitioners’ liability, as well as general guidance concerning drafting and implementing legislation and regulations concerning EPT.