Widening the circle of who can safely deliver PrEP.
A multi-year research program at Xavier University of Louisiana — moving HIV prevention from specialist clinics to the primary-care providers and community pharmacists who already sit at the front door of underserved communities.
One question, told in three chapters.
Widening access to PrEP starts with widening who can provide it. These three studies ask — and answer — whether that circle can grow while keeping patients in care.
Provider type & retention
Retrospective cohort at a New Orleans FQHC comparing infectious-disease specialists with primary-care providers on keeping PrEP patients in care.
Pharmacy readiness
Statewide needs assessment of community pharmacists: who already stocks PrEP, who serves these patients, and which languages they speak.
Pharmacist willingness
Knowledge, attitudes, confidence and barriers among community pharmacists — most working in high HIV-incidence regions of the Deep South.
What the data show.
Every figure below is drawn from primary study data conducted by xulavoice.com, housed in Xavier University of Louisiana's College of Pharmacy. Sample sizes are stated on each panel; the pharmacist studies are response-driven samples concentrated in Louisiana and the Gulf South.
The specialist advantage is a mirage
Odds of retention for ID specialists vs. primary-care providers — before and after adjusting for age, race, and risk. When confounders are controlled, provider type stops predicting who stays in care.
Retention in care
Follow-up captured across the first six months of PrEP.
Pharmacies are already stocked
Share of surveyed pharmacies offering each service.
Willing and positive — and ready to be trained
The readiness picture in a single view. Attitudes and perceived importance already run high; formal knowledge and training are where focused investment pays off — exactly what a training-and-implementation partnership delivers.
What's standing in the way
Perceived barriers to prescribing PrEP, ranked by mean rating (higher = greater barrier). Notably, belief-based objections ranked among the lowest measured — the obstacles here are practical and operational, not attitudinal.
The evidence points to one intervention.
Seven years of data converge on a single, fundable conclusion. The 2019 outcomes study established that expanding PrEP beyond infectious-disease specialists does not cost patients their retention in care — primary-care providers perform equivalently once you adjust for who their patients are.
The 2024–25 needs assessment showed that community pharmacies are already positioned to be the next link in that chain: two-thirds serve PrEP patients, most stock the medication, and many speak the languages of the communities most affected.
The 2025–26 willingness study located the one missing piece. Pharmacists want to prescribe and see it as responsible care — the one thing between intent and action is training, the most solvable barrier of all. The legal pathway, meanwhile, is already open: since 2024, Louisiana's Act 711 authorizes pharmacists to furnish PrEP. That gap is the opportunity — and it's what XULA Voice was built to close. Housed at Xavier University of Louisiana — the nation's leading producer of Black pharmacists — XULA Voice is positioned to deliver that training, bringing a ready, trusted, geographically distributed workforce online in exactly the high-incidence communities where the epidemic persists.
Communities are our partners — grounded in a century of trust.
XULA Voice practices community-engaged, participatory research — communities are our partners at every step, from shaping the questions to sharing what we learn. That partnership is built on Xavier's century of roots in the same New Orleans communities we serve, so a pharmacist-delivered PrEP program reaches people through the faith and community organizations they already know and trust.
Embedded in local partners
We meet people where they already gather — in faith and social centers and neighborhood organizations across New Orleans — so health information arrives through voices the community already trusts.
Community health workers & students
We train community health workers and Xavier pharmacy students in research skills, cultural competence, and communication — building prevention capacity that remains long after a study ends.
Multilingual by design
Our team and partner pharmacies reach residents in Spanish, Vietnamese, and Arabic, so language is never the barrier standing between someone and prevention.
An HBCU-anchored pharmacy research team.
Grounded at Xavier University of Louisiana — the nation's leading producer of Black pharmacists — and built on decades of community-engaged research across the Gulf South.
Clinical Professor in Xavier's College of Pharmacy and principal investigator of XULA Voice. An infectious-disease pharmacist (BCPS) holding a PharmD from Xavier, an MPH in epidemiology from Tulane, and a PhD in international health from Johns Hopkins, she is a former Fulbright Scholar whose research centers on vaccine access, equity, and the disproportionate impact of infectious disease on marginalized communities. She has led community-engaged, faith-based prevention studies funded by Genentech, the NIH/NIMHD, and Pfizer, and has consulted for the WHO and UNICEF.
Doctoral-trained biostatistician, Executive Director of the Office of Health Equity Research at Yale School of Medicine, and a former tenured professor at Xavier University of Louisiana. He is Multiple PI of the national RCMI Coordinating Center — a network of 23 NIH-funded institutions — and served as Director and Co-PI of the $50-million Jackson Heart Study, the benchmark longitudinal cardiovascular study in African Americans. He brings three decades of study design, program evaluation, and health-equity methodology to XULA Voice.
Directs Xavier's College of Pharmacy Health & Wellness Center — a community-based practice offering free chronic-disease screenings, medication check-ups, smoking-cessation coaching, and diabetes and healthy-cooking classes. As XULA Voice's law-and-regulatory specialist and Board of Pharmacy liaison, he teaches pharmacy law at Xavier and has served as President of the Louisiana Pharmacists Association and Vice Chair of the Louisiana Board of Medical Examiners' Advisory Committee for Collaborative Practice. He was at the forefront of creating Louisiana's pharmacist PrEP law — Act 711 (House Bill 579, 2024), which authorizes pharmacists to dispense up to a 30-day supply of PrEP and a 28-day supply of PEP. The legal foundation for pharmacist-delivered PrEP in Louisiana already exists — and a member of this team helped write it.
Directs Xavier's Professional Experience Program, coordinating student placements and clinical partnerships across more than 300 pharmacies statewide — a ready-built network for training pharmacists and rolling out pharmacist-delivered PrEP across Louisiana.
Xavier University of Louisiana
College of Pharmacy · Division of Clinical and Administrative Sciences, New Orleans. All studies reviewed and approved by the Xavier University of Louisiana Institutional Review Board.
Help bring PrEP to the Gulf South's front door.
We're looking for partners — foundations, health systems, industry, and community organizations — to build out the training and implementation phase with us, turning a willing, already-authorized pharmacist workforce into a functioning prevention network. Study data, protocols, and materials are available to prospective partners on request.
Sara Al-Dahir, PharmD, PhD · saaldah@xula.edu · (504) 520-5766