Screening for Syphilis During Pregnancy

Hilary Reno, MD, PhD, FIDSA, is a professor of medicine in the division of infectious disease at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. She focuses on the care of patients with STIs and HIV. As the primary investigator of the St. Louis STI/HIV Prevention Training Center, she wants to provide innovative and engaging education for all clinicians involved in sexual health care. She is past medical director of the St. Louis County sexual health clinic and a medical consultant with CDC’s Division of STD Prevention since 2016.

Dr. Reno specializes in sexual health care, with a special focus on the clinical care of STIs and the intersection with HIV prevention. Her research focuses on the use of large clinical databases to improve STI care and to encourage regional cooperation and quality improvement in sexual health care. She also is the site primary investigator for studies that evaluate new therapeutics and testing modalities for STIs and collaborates with basic scientists to collect clinical samples for research focused on the vaginal microbiome and other studies. As a consultant with CDC’s Division of STD Prevention, she is a coauthor of the 2021 CDC STI Treatment Guidelines and the CDC doxy-PEP guidelines.

Susan Kendig, JD, WHNP-BC, FAANP, is a board-certified women’s health nurse practitioner and attorney with over four decades of experience as a health care professional, educator, and strategist. Her work is grounded in a strong background at the intersection of clinical practice, policy, and public health. Currently, Kendig is a women’s health integration specialist with SSM Health Women’s Services in St. Louis, Missouri; an adjunct professor in the Saint Louis University College of Public Health and Social Justice Center of Excellence in Maternal and Child Health Education, Science and Practice; and director of women’s health nurse practitioner practice and policy at the National Association of Nurse Practitioners in Women’s Health. Prior to joining SSM Health, Kendig was a teaching professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where she led the women’s health nurse practitioner program for almost two decades. Sue is a member of the Women’s Preventive Services Initiative Advisory Panel, which guides a HRSA-funded collaborative interdisciplinary effort to develop, review, and disseminate recommendations for women’s preventive health care services. Active with the Alliance for Innovation in Maternal Health national team, Kendig co-led development of maternal safety bundles related to mental health, postpartum, and women’s health. She is committed to the concept of clinical and community integration as a tool to improve health outcomes, and to optimize quality in health care service delivery. To this end, she has provided technical assistance to integrated primary care medical homes, behavioral health homes, and other value-based care initiatives, and collective impact maternal and infant mortality reduction efforts in urban and rural communities.

Tammy Bennett, DNP, WHNP-BC, has 25 years of experience as a women’s health nurse practitioner and is the current associate director for the Clinical Training Center for Sexual and Reproductive Health, which serves as the grant-funded training specialists for clinical Title X health care professionals. Bennett is licensed as a certified women’s health nurse practitioner and advanced practice registered nurse in both Arkansas and Louisiana. Bennett holds a BS in nursing, an MS, and a DNP. She has three publications surrounding client electronic notification for STIs, extragenital screening for STIs within Title X clinics, and implementation of rapid syphilis testing in Louisiana to improve syphilis screening rates. Additionally, Bennett served as the expert reviewer for the 2021 updated U.S. Selected Practice Recommendations for self-administration of subcutaneous DMPA.

Megan Higdon, MPH, currently works at Altarum as the program director for sexual and reproductive health and maternal and child health. Prior to this, she held various roles at Planned Parenthood Southeast, including senior director of strategy and process improvement and director of quality improvement. Higdon also served as project director at The Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast and as the manager of evaluation at Rollins School of Public Health at Emory. In both of those positions, she directed work focused on examining the accessibility and quality of sexual and reproductive health services for people in the Southeast United States.

Higdon started her career at Planned Parenthood of Illinois, where she provided direct patient care and acted as manager of medical programs and quality assurance across all Illinois health centers. She earned her BA from the University of Oklahoma and her MPH with a focus in community health sciences from the University of Illinois Chicago.