In May 2014, Medixine’s partner YML, one of the leading private laboratories in Finland, launched a new service portal for fighting sexually transmitted disease (STD). The service called Telelab is based on Medixine’s software and the first customer was the city of Vantaa with a population of 212,000. This fall, also the city of Tampere (pop 216,000) and the Finnish national student healthcare organization have taken the service into use.
In the service the customer simply logs in and orders a test kit to be sent to his home address. After taking the test, the customer mails the kit to the lab and gets an SMS notification when the results are available. To read the result he again logs in to the service using two factor authentication. The service is easy to use and free of charge for the user – even postage is prepaid.
The goal of the service is to promote health and save health care resources by providing an easier and less stressful way to get tested. Especially teenagers and people having busy work weeks may find it difficult to get to the laboratory. Test kits ordered via the e-service will be sent to the laboratory the same way as test kits taken at doctor’s office. The health care provider will contact all patients with a positive result in case they don’t contact their doctor themselves.
In Finland, approximately 13.000 chlamydia infections are diagnosed per year. There are ca 300 gonorrhea cases annually, but the numbers are increasing. Both diseases may not cause symptoms, but can cause the patient for example reproductive challenges if not diagnosed in time. According to the Finnish student healthcare organization, the twelve month average number of chlamydia tests from January 2010 to July 2015 has risen 27 %.
The service can be found at www.telelab.fi