STI and HIV Testing at Fenway Health: Data Update

Happy Pride Month! Here at Fenway we associate this time of year with love, freedom of expression, and sex positivity. This month, the Data Team dives deeper into our LGBTQ patients and some of the STI and HIV testing that takes place here at Fenway.

At Fenway, about 60% of patients are LGBTQ. The graphs below displays our LGBTQ patients by subpopulation (figure 1) and by race/ethnicity (figure 2). Queer, cisgender men make up about 57% of LGBTQ patients at Fenway; Transgender, Genderqueer, and Nonbinary (TGNB) folks make up about 36% of LGBTQ patients at Fenway; and Queer, cisgender women make up about 17% of LGBTQ patients. Among TGNB folks, our patients are 37% transgender men, 31.4% genderqueer/nonbinary, and 31.3% transgender women. Our LGBTQ patients are 25.8% people of color/Latinx folks and 74.3% white/non-Latinx.

We reviewed testing data from the 2017 Pride season up to this year’s Pride season (June 1, 2017-June 1, 2019). Over these two years, Fenway conducted 223,894 HIV and STI tests! Below are graphs of the number of tests performed between 6/1/2017-5/31/2018 (year 1) and 6/1/2018-5/31/2019 (year 2) and proportion of each of our patient sub populations who have been tested for STIs/HIV in this two-year timeframe:

Figure 4. Positivity rate of HIV/STIs at all Clinical sites. Notes: *Per the 2015 CDC STD Treatment Guidelines, routine oropharyngeal screening for chlamydia is NOT recommended. In 2018, Fenway removed this test from the Quest Lan Panel. **This includes tests with folks who are known to be living with HIV who automatically had an HIV test completed due to concurrent testing with HCV/Syphilis.

Data prepared by Asia Brice, Corinne Fournier, and Danielle Funk.