Wired is reporting on a new website developed by Doug Wightman, a Stanford graduate student, and the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation (AIM). The program has been based on AIM’s decade old STD detection service.
SxCheck, which launched this month, is the latest contender in the movement to change how we think about STIs. It’s a joint project between Stanford graduate student Doug Wightman, 23, and the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation, or AIM, offering the general public an STI testing service based on one the adult industry has developed over a decade.
AIM made the mainstream press a few years ago when actor Darren James (NSFW) returned from a trip to Brazil and tested positive for HIV.
“AIM detected all of the patient’s partners within 24 hours, and found three infections within 10 days,” says AIM founder Dr. Sharon Mitchell. The partners didn’t work or have sex for 60 days until they tested negative two months in a row; no one else became infected. AIM was credited with acting quickly and effectively stopping an industrywide epidemic before it began.
The SxCheck process is simple. You decide which STIs you want to be screened for, order your test online, go to a local blood draw station, and access your results on the website. It differs from its sister AIMCheck in one way: Your results are not sent to producers and agents.
Negative test results are available online via digital certificate, while positive results — and what you can do about them — are communicated to you over the phone.
Doug believes that by making STI testing routine, and the results easy to show to potential partners, SxCheck will have a profound impact on social behavior.
Doug envisions us embedding HTML in our online dating profiles to share test results and the date of our last screening, and he’s already working on making results accessible (securely) by mobile phone. That makes information available when you need it, without the social awkwardness of carrying a lab slip folded up in your back pocket “just in case.”
I’m not exactly optimistic that MySpace fans are going to be chomping at the bit to post their +/- Chlamydia status on their buddy list but at least Doug is trying. Online STD/STI testing isn’t a brand new idea, with several other competitively priced sites like Request a Test, All Tests Online and more.
Read on here . . .
