National HIV Behavioral Surveillance (NHBS) is a survey that has happened every year since 2003 in 20 cities throughout the United States. Each year, the survey is taken by approximately 500 people in each city who are eligible based on that year’s population theme – a rotation of people who inject drugs (PWID), men who have sex with men (MSM), and “high-risk heterosexuals.” The California Department of Public Health had been receiving data from San Diego’s NHBS surveys since 2013, but had never had the bandwidth to analyze the data.
In 2021, they used federal spend-down money to hire Facente Consulting to design and conduct a series of exploratory analyses for the last three rounds of PWID and MSM cycles in San Diego. After data sharing agreements were completed, Facente Consulting spent about three months digging into the data, ultimately supplying the California Department of Public Health with (1) R code that would allow them to easily synthesize and clean the raw datasets for future analyses, and (2) a summary of preliminary findings about trends related to HIV risk for PWID and MSM in San Diego over the last decade.