Austin Price, MD, MPH

Professional Background

Dr. Austin Price grew up in rural Southeastern Kansas in the small town of Girard. He completed his undergraduate studies locally at Pittsburg State University, earning a BS in Biology. He then attended the University of Kansas School of Medicine beginning in 2014. After his 3rd year of medical school, he took a hiatus from medical training to pursue a Masters in Public Health with special focus on infectious disease epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. He returned to Kansas City and completed his medical school training in 2019. He completed his internal medicine residency training from 2019-2022 at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, California before again returning to Kansas City for infectious diseases fellowship at the University of Kansas. He served as Chief ID Fellow during his 2nd year of ID training before graduating from fellowship in June 2024. He joined the University of Kansas Infectious Diseases Division as an Assistant Professor in August 2024.

Dr. Price rotates on the General ID inpatient services providing consultative assistance on all manner of infection related problems. His outpatient clinical focus centers upon the treatment of Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, and the treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections. He has particular interests in the care of LGBTQ individuals.

Dr. Price recently assumed the role of co-lead of the HIV Providers Section within the Division of Infectious Diseases. He has many goals in this new role, but most importantly aims to assist the division in expanding its presence as the premiere institution for HIV care and prevention in the Kansas City Metro.

Research

Overview

Dr. Price's research interests center mostly around HIV/AIDS and STI treatment and prevention. While in Baltimore, he worked as a study investigator exploring the utility of online geospatial networking applications to engage at-risk individuals in HIV/STI testing and linkage to care. His masters thesis explored the experiences of stigma and associated sequelae of survivors of the 2014-2016 African Ebola epidemic. In fellowship, he worked to create a local HIV Care Continuum specific to the Kansas City Metropolitan Area. He was additionally involved in QI projects to help increase the uptake of statin therapy amongst patients living with HIV based on data from the Reprieve Trial.

He is currently working on development of a risk-model based on data available within the electronic health record which may be able to predict the risk of future HIV acquisition, and thereby identify individuals that warrant consideration of additional preventative measures (i.e. PrEP). He is interested in community-wide engagement efforts to increase HIV screening, diagnosis, and linkage to care, and is currently seeking grant funding to help provide HIV screening on an opt-out basis for at-risk individuals in the emergency department.

He has future aspirations to pursue QI projects related to bacterial STI prevention, particularly focused on the utility of doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis (doxyPEP), as well as, increasing uptake of anal PAP testing for the identification and treatment of anal dysplasia amongst patients living with HIV.