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HIV continues to be a prevalent public health concern across the globe. In the United States, more than 37,000 new HIV diagnoses and 6,000 deaths were reported in 2014, nearly half of which occurred in the southeastern United States (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2017). Diagnosis and treatment initiation for people living with HIV (PLWH) remains an essential skill for all health care providers (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2017). With advances in antiretroviral therapy (ART), and an increasing awareness of the benefits of viral suppression, numerous changes in guidelines for the initiation of ART have taken place. Largely, due to a greater understanding of the benefits of early treatment and research on the safety and efficacy of treatment regimens, the major organizations that set best practice guidelines inHIV treatment recommend that all PLWH receive treatment as soon as possible regardless ofCD4T-cell count (Table 1; Eholié et al., 2016). The World Health Organization 2018, National Institutes of Health (NIH; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2018), and International Antiviral Society, USA ( Saag, et al., 2018), all updated their guidelines in 2018 to recommend initiating “rapid start” ART for treatment-naive patients as early as possible and, when feasible, on the same day as diagnosis. Unfortunately, clinical providers have been slow to follow the updated guidelines, with little uptake in rapid start programs (Colasanti et al., 2018). Several key benefits of rapid start ART have been consistently demonstrated, including decreased time to viral suppression, increased retention in care, and a reduction in morbidity and mortality (Ford et al., 2018). Although evidence has supported the findings that viral suppression eliminates the possibility of transmission, only 57.2% of those diagnosed with HIV have been retained in care, and only 59.8% have achieved viral suppression (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018). In 2016, the Undetectable 5 Untransmittable campaignwas launched, acknowledging decades of research demonstrating that HIV cannot be sexually transmitted with an undetectable viral load, defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as fewer than 200 copies per milliliter (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018; Editorial: U5U taking off in 2017, 2017). In a San Francisco-based study examining the impact of a rapid care initiation protocol on outcomes in PLWH, researchers found that the median time to virologic suppressionwas 56days among rapid start patients compared to 79 days in those treated undermore general guidelines for universal ART initiation (p5 .009; Pilcher et al., 2017). This result was supported by the work of Colasanti et al. (2018), who found a median decrease in time to viral suppression from 77 to 57 days (p, .0022) in the standard care and rapid start groups, respectively. Although variations in baseline viral load and CD4 T-cell count may ultimately impact the overall time to viral suppression, baseline viral load and the risk of HIV transmission have been positively correlated, underscoring the importance of addressing treatment at the earliest possible time (Cohen et al., 2011). By targeting a minimal to lower initial viral load and a significantly decreased time to viral suppression, rapid start ART can positively affect the health of the individual and, by potentially reducing transmission, the greater public health community. Current practice varies widely among clinics, with providers often seeing patients over multiple visits to complete confirmatory testing, laboratory testing, and selection of an ART regimen. This multistage process of treatment initiation increases the risk of losing patients to followup, leaving patientswith higher viral loads, and increasing transmission risks (Rosen & Fox, 2011). In Sponsorships or competing interests thatmay be relevant to content are disclosed at the end of this article.