Denise Bryan, STD and HIV supervisor for the Kent County Health Department, is excited about the county’s new HIV testing program, and believes it will raise testing rates in the county.

The Ambassador Program provides individuals rewards in the form of gift cards for gasoline or groceries for coming in to the department for a rapid HIV test. The test requires a finger prick, and takes 20 minutes to get results.

Bryan said the program relies on peer pressure to be successful and hopes to expand testing for men engaging in sex with other men.

“It’s a social network strategy,” Bryan said. “We are so influenced by our peer group in terms of where we go to eat to where we go to hang out at a coffee house. It’s seriously underestimated.”

Under the Michigan Department of Community Health-funded program, an individual who comes in for rapid testing, receives counseling to determine risks as well as the test. The individual is then invited to participate in the Ambassador program. In that program, they identify how many in their peer group they think they can recruit to get tested. They are then given cards to give to the peers they recruit for testing.

Those cards give the holder a jump to the front of the line in the testing site privilege.

“We want to make testing as barrier free as possible,” Bryan said.

Following the testing, the individual is given a gift card, and then recruited as an ambassador as well.

As for the original ambassador, they are given a time frame in which to recruit their peers for testing.

“So say they identified six people, and gave out five cards, but only four of them came back, then we give them $40 in gift cards,” Bryan said. That, she said, ends the ambassador role.

The MDCH grant was for $70,000, Bryan said, and covers the cost of an independent contractor to do testing, gift cards, and administrative costs.

Statistics for the program, which was formally launched in August, are not yet available, but Bryan said she thinks the program — which has been used in other locations across the state and the country — can increase testing from 1 percent of the population to as much as 9 percent.

Bryan said the county performed over 3,200 tests last year, and expect to have completed 4,000 tests at the end of this year. State statistics show Kent County has 765 cases of HIV-positive individuals.

For Bryan the program is about customer service. And when good customer service is provided, she argues, people are far more likely to refer.

“They put more credibility on their peer’s views,” Bryan said, in comparison to say “the guy in the lab coat telling them to get tested.”

Bryan says by connecting into peer groups, the program is also reaching into at risk populations which might not normally seek testing for HIV.

To advertise the program, they county is placing advertisements in places like Craigslist and other social networking sites.