Gay City News (04.07.05) - Wednesday, April 27, 2005
On March 3, Dr. Scott Kellerman became the New York City
Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's new assistant
commissioner for HIV/AIDS Services, heading a bureau with a
$220 million annual budget and some 230 staff members. The
bureau oversees funds to many city AIDS service organizations,
the city's HIV prevention efforts, AIDS policy, surveillance,
and epidemiology.
Kellerman earned his medical degree from the University of
South Florida and his master's in public health from Emory
University. Prior to joining the city department, he worked
for 10 years at CDC, the last five on AIDS issues in Africa
and India. "Over the years it became obvious to me that if I
was really going to make an impact on [HIV] transmission rates
that I'd have to get back to work at the local level," said
Kellerman.
Kellerman's bureau is developing measures to assess the
performance of its contractors to see if spending is
translating into results. "We're creating an outcomes
evaluation team within the bureau to really start thinking
about if we spend 10 million dollars on X after a year or two
or three what did we get out of it?" he said. "Did it really
go to the goal of decreasing transmission?"
Kellerman said that maybe the time has come to consider "non-
traditional" AIDS strategies. "I don't know what that means
yet, but I'm really going to be thinking about what that means
over the next six months or so," he said. "We're 20 years into
this thing. We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars in
this town alone on traditional prevention efforts and we're
still dealing with 4,000 new diagnoses in this town alone."