Grant: CIHR Fellowship

This project aims to explore the factors and processes that are required to ensure continued public health benefits of digital tools for sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing especially after initial efforts to implement them. Understanding these factors and processes can help us develop methods to ensure continued benefits across different contexts and for other digital interventions beyond STIs. This is important because Canada has invested significantly in digital interventions especially during the COVID-19 pandemic and we currently know little about what can sustain the benefits of these digital interventions in the long-term. Using GetCheckedOnline, a provincial digital STI testing service in BC, Canada, the project will involve interviews with implementers and partners to understand their perspectives on what has sustained the service over the past decade and a review of program documents exploring issues related to sustainability of the program over this period. The project will also involve an analysis of current utilization patterns among users of the digital STI testing service, to understand how these testing patterns may contribute to its sustainability, including exploring inappropriate, under, and overuse of digital testing services. All analyses will adopt an equity perspective to understand how sustainability of these digital services may intersect with equity goals of the health systems.