Co-Founder and Director Building Healthy Online Communnities Richmond, California, United States
TakeMeHome is a project of Building Healthy Online Communities (BHOC), created to increase access to HIV and STI testing among people most likely to have new partners, namely dating app users. BHOC has built relationships with many dating apps, particularly those who serve gay, bi and queer communities. We developed our own test ordering platform to distribute oral rapid at-home test kits and HIV/STI self-collection samples for lab processing. We leveraged partnerships with Emory, NASTAD, and local public health departments to implement this program.
In partnership with Emory, we identified that a high proportion of MSM dating app users had never tested for HIV or had not tested within the past year. Prior research has demonstrated that people face many barriers to access in-person sexual health testing, including: knowing where to test, costs, hours of service, transportation, fear of judgment by providers, and concerns about privacy. Being able to access sexual health testing via online ordering platform in a seamless, nonjudgmental way, can complement clinic-based testing for those who might not otherwise get tested.
Our dating app partners currently drive 50% of all traffic and orders to the site through a mix of in-kind messages, permanent links in FAQs and other sexual health content on their apps that have been developed in partnership with BHOC.
We have 16 health jurisdictions participating in our HIV/STI self-collection testing, including several states, and a number of midwestern and western counties.
Since rolling out lab testing in Jan 2021, 1646 participants have received HIV and/or STI lab results, with 23.5% of participants reporting never having had a sexual health test before. Our rejection rate is less than 2%. Our positivity across any STI is 13% and is broken down as follows: 7% chlamydia, 3.4% gonorrhea, 1.4% syphilis , 1.1% HIV 0.1% Hep C.
This program helps people in priority communities overcome barriers to testing. By working with our dating app partners to promote this service, and partnering with our public health departments, we successfully tested new individuals in priority populations and identified incident STI cases.
