• by Les Luchter , Staff Writer, Yesterday

This summer, back-to-school stories in our parent publication Marketing Daily have focused on Kohl’s, Target and other retailers. Pharma & Health Insider will instead concentrate on sex.

College sex, that is, and the millions of students heading back, or arriving for the first time, to campuses across the country.

Sex brings stress, often in tandem with the fear of contracting HIV or STIs (sexually transmitted infections).

One solution is testing, which can detect STIs and --  if the student is also free of HIV -- clear the way to a PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) prescription for HIV prevention.

If only these Gen Z-ers could take care of this the way they do everything else: over their phones.

Alas, no surprise, there’s a telehealth app for that!

A few, in fact, including Freddie, Mistr, QCare+ and Healthvana.

To dig deeper, we spoke with Ramin Bastani, CEO of Healthvana, which entered the direct-to-consumer space a year ago after a decade of providing its services, he told us, to “nearly a million” people through some of “the biggest clinics in the country.”  Those clinics, he added, have asked Healthvana not to reveal their names.

Healthvana, which provides its service for free to insured patients, features a BOGO (in this case, “Buy One, Give One”) offer as a key selling point. “For every insured person who uses our telehealth,” Bastani explained, “we’ll help someone uninsured get access to free PrEP care.”

This is the same model Bombas uses for its socks, Bastani said. (That company donates a pair to the needy for every pair purchased.)

Healthvana, which monetizes through insurance company reimbursements, has been increasing its advertising on Meta platforms, Bastani said.

The text of one recent ad reads, “You protect yourself. Someone else gets protected too. That’s the whole idea. PrEP Care (testing, visits & medication) is free for most patients — insured or uninsured. Medication is prescribed at the healthcare provider’s discretion.”

Yet word-of-mouth remains Healthvana’s most prominent tool to reach consumers, Bastani noted.

A lot of that word-of-mouth lauds the service’s AI option, he boasted.

College students turn to AI to discuss sexual health largely due to stigma associated with the topic, Bastani explained. “Younger people want to learn about these stigmatizing topics….You’re  not sure what you know and what you don’t know."  While looking answers up in Google remains “in your search history,” Healthvana’s AI does not.  “And it helps to ask questions,” he stressed.

Responses via AI are immediate, Bastani adds. Healthvana does offer the option of messaging with a real-life provider, but that could take “maybe a day or two.”

He cited a recent Healthvana study conducted with Stanford University and published in Nature Digital Medicine, in which “some patients talked to the AI hundreds of times, if not thousands, over the course of a year.”

That study, of 150,000 patients across 15 states, also found that 80% who used the AI “came from communities of color, which are most impacted by HIV,” Bastani noted, and that “patients who talked to the AI even once were three times as likely to start on PrEP, and nearly twice as likely to stay on PrEP once they were on it.”

“People entering college are already AI-native in a lot of ways, and they’re certainly living their lives on their phones and online,” he related. “A big thing for us is meeting people where they’re at….to give then options about what they can do to help protect themselves and their health.”

It’s largely about “access to care,” he stated. “More and more of healthcare is going online, and more and more of it will be supplemented by AI. “

The growth of telehealth rings especially true in “areas where you have really high anxiety, a lot of stigma, lack of education or awareness.”

“We want [HIV prevention] to be accessible on their phones, we want it to be easier for them to use, we want there to be no cost if possible,” Bastani declared.