“My position was always, it depends on where you are. If you have a high prevalence of a disease that you are taking care of in your ED, it’s absolutely a missed opportunity If we don’t offer some of these things that can actually help our patients either avoid and prevent disease or, at the very least, catch them early on so you can treat them,” she said. “That’s what’s happened with HIV. The face of HIV has changed totally because it’s now looked at as a chronic disease, people want to find it earlier. They want to treat it so that they can have as normal life as they can.”

When she took a new job as the chair and professor of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, she brought this model of intervention with her. Her new community has a higher prevalence of Hepatitis C than HIV, so they began screening for that in the ED as well. Today, their patients can be screened for HIV, Hepatitis C and substance use disorder.

Dr. Calderon’s outreach program uses a health educator model, bringing in those who are interested in public health or medical school and are passionate about finding patients who need help and linking them to care. Though the health educators often stay only two or three years, Dr. Calderon thinks that turnover rate is ideal because they can operate with full emotional commitment to the program and then move on to new roles in public health. It also allows her to get more underrepresented individuals involved in the program.

“It was a pipeline program to diversify medicine,” Dr. Calderon said. “And we need that in the most desperate way.” She’s passionate about helping the next generation because without the encouragement of her mentors, Dr. Calderon never would have gone into medicine. Over the 20 years she’s worked on this project, most of her mentees have kept in touch and stayed in the public health sector.

Her impact on her local community and the broader medical community has not gone unnoticed. In 2022, Dr. Calderon received one of the highest honors in health care when she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine. What fuels her to keep going?

“I don’t like injustice,” Dr. Calderon explained. “If there are health outcomes that are not the same, and one group is benefiting more than another, one has to find that and then correct it. That’s our obligation.