• Information about prevention of HBV and HCV transmission in hospital and nonhospital health-care settings.

• Information about discrimination and stigma associated with hepatitis B and hepatitis C and guidance on reducing them.

• Information about health disparities related to hepatitis B and hepatitis C.

CDC should examine interventions that target several venues and types of providers, such as educational institutions, health-care facilities, substance-abuse service providers, and alternative-care providers.

Schools of medicine, nursing, physician assistants, complementary and alternative medicine, and public health should develop improved curricula to ensure that their graduates are knowledgeable about chronic hepatitis B and hepatitis C. The curricula should include information on disease prevalence, risk factors, preventive actions, appropriate diagnostics, selection of persons for testing, and appropriate followup for chronically infected patients and those susceptible to infection.

Continuing-medical-education courses and activities about viral hepatitis conducted online or at provider meetings should be regularly offered to family-practice physicians, internists, OB/GYNs, pediatricians, nurses, and physician assistants. Drug-treatment counselors’ education and certification examinations should also include hepatitis B and hepatitis C. Questions about chronic hepatitis B should be included on board-certification or recertification examinations for internists, family-practice physicians, pediatricians, and OB/GYNs; and questions about chronic hepatitis C should be included in board examinations for internists and family-practice physicians. Although there has been no systematic effort to determine whether continuing-medical-education courses and certification examinations include questions about hepatitis B and hepatitis C, the shortcomings in knowledge among health-care providers suggest that current efforts are insufficient, and that new approaches are needed to improve knowledge.

Educational programs should include targeted outreach to and enrollment of providers who work in high-risk venues (for example, STD and HIV clinics) and in areas where there are many at-risk foreign-born clients, such as hospitals, clinics, and community health centers that serve large populations of Asian and Pacific Islander (API) and foreign-born patients from other highly endemic regions.