July 2008 was the last time I posted a blog. Now that I have more time on my hands, I promise to rant more often.

Recently the agency was awarded the www.personalabs.com and www.JustGetTested.com account. These national (even global) pieces of business have really opened my eyes to taking charge of my own personal health. But more importantly it showed me the power of mining the data available to you on the Internet by statistical software such as Google Analytics and VisiStats. In the first few months after being awarded the business, conducting a massive web site overhaul and employing over 4000 pages of SEO, I began to monitor the site on a daily basis. That daily basis rapidly moved into an hourly basis, which eventually became me monitoring the site in “real time.” While monitoring the JustGetTested.com  site, which caters to the STD testing market, I witnessed an interesting phenomenon with regards to the usage that dovetailed back to the physiographical research. Almost 40% of the business for the site was conducted during what I like to call the “Oh, shit!” hours of midnight to four in the morning. People coming home and perhaps realizing they made a mistake or people who are simply lying in bed, worried and wanting to take action. These same people logged on to a secure, anonymous site in which they can order from a myriad of tests, all without a doctor’s prescription. They are then sent to any one of the over 1700 LabCorp locations across the United States with a simple bar code print out that tells the folks at the draw site to either get urine or blood. Then within 72 hours you’re emailed back your results in plain English. All the while a licensed Medical Doctor monitors this. Pretty cool stuff. No insurance claims. No CDC lists to be put on (if you were positive, unless it is HIV).

I have personally begun using the Personalabs.com site for management of my own personal health. As many of you know I am a Type II diabetic and have found it very difficult to obtain affordable life insurance…apparently when you don’t get accepted by one company they put you on some kind of a black list so that all the other companies are aware. This online service affords me the opportunity to manage my hemoglobin A1C levels without a doctor’s prescription and without my insurance company being reported to. This will also enable me to wait another year and try for insurance again.

Since “watching” the statistics in “real time,” I have employed statistical gathering software on this blog. I email the original message to about 150 of you who like to read my rhetoric, only to find out that within 72 hours over 3700 people read it in four different countries.