Dissemination Core

Dissemination Core Project Summary The long-term goal of the Johns Hopkins Center for Innovative Diagnostics for Infectious Diseases is to accelerate infectious disease diagnostic point-of-care (POC) technology innovation and access to impact global public health. The training of physical and computational scientists, engineers, as well as researchers from other relevant disciplines, regarding clinical and process issues related to the development of point-of- care devices is critical to accelerating the translation of these technologies into clinical use. Identifying and understanding the needs of clinical end users and the sites at which devices will be used is fundamental to a successful device design process. Development of acceptable, affordable point of care tests (POCTs) for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and emerging and re-emerging infections is a public and population health imperative at this time of increasing national and global incidence and decreasing treatment options for STIs and overlapping pandemics and outbreaks. As the Dissemination Core of the proposed Center for Innovative Diagnostics for Infectious Diseases, we will collaborate with all cores and continue to assess and communicate unmet clinical and end-user needs for STI POCT development and adoption; identify potential obstacles to moving along the developmental pipeline from other stakeholder perspectives (policy makers, investors, marketers, lower and middle income country health systems); work with national and international training partners to disseminate this information; provide a menu of training opportunities to developers and other stakeholders including open-access web-based trainings, in-person didactic and experiential sessions, observational preceptorships tailored to developer needs, national and international conference presentation, and publications.