How we evaluated myLAB Box
We evaluate testing services based upon the quality of the experience, the cost of products, information privacy, speed, and customer care.
Quality
8.4/10
Quality encompasses the reliability of lab facilities, standards and accuracy of testing, the logic behind the multi-test kits, and the level of customer care.
- The labs that partner with myLAB Box are CLIA-certified and CAP-accredited. They meet standards defined by the Clinical Laboratories Improvement Act and adhere to guidelines determined by the College of American Pathologists.
- Antigen tests and blood or urine chemistry follow the same protocols that would apply in a clinic.
- The inclusion of a telemedicine consultation in the event of a positive STI test result means that you can acquire prescription treatment for certain common STIs and have medication sent to your local pharmacy.
- The test kits are easy to use, and the way that tests come in different packages should appeal to many patients.
The myLAB Box kits themselves are well-assembled, and they come with large bandages and swatches of gauze for finger-prick tests. Strangely, not all of the blood tests our testers took came with the same kind of lancets. One type (blue and white) was markedly easier to use than the other, but the other type (yellow and white) induced far less pain.
Much to the dismay of some of our testers, urine collection for various myLAB Box tests isn’t as tidy as it could be. We’ve seen other companies include pipettes to draw urine out of a collection cup and put it into the specimen tube, but there was no such implement among the tests we ordered. Instead, our testers had to carefully pour their urine from the box-shaped cup into the tube. As you can imagine, there was some spilling.
Cost
8.5/10
Some of these kits can be expensive, but most land in a rough middle-ground for similar offerings from competitive services. myLAB Box also includes two-way expedited shipping in the up-front price of all kits, so there isn’t any surprise fee at checkout.
- If you plan to screen a few times per year, kit subscriptions provide additional savings, and free two-way shipping becomes an increasingly important feature.
- You can pay for kits using your FSA or HSA, if applicable.
- For some people, the physical privacy of collecting your own specimens is worth the cost by itself — which brings us to our third concern.
Privacy
8.8/10
The level of privacy surrounding your test results is similar to the level of privacy a healthcare system would offer. Privacy breaches are possible no matter where your data is stored, but the company takes privacy very seriously.
Let’s consider confidentiality first. The law may require a lab that processes your sample to report certain positive STI tests to their state’s Department of Health. This information would include your:
- Name
- Address
- Phone
- Date of birth
- Sex
- Collection date
- Collection location (e.g., oral, anal)
- Test date
Bear in mind that if a doctor had ordered the test, they would have to report the same information to your home state’s Department of Health, along with information about any treatment prescribed. They can’t disclose this information to any third party (e.g., insurance providers).
Your lab results will be available online for you to download; this information accessibility is also what most large healthcare organizations would offer.
myLAB Box asserts that they never sell, rent, or share any personally identifiable customer data. If another entity ever acquired myLAB Box, your data (name and contact information) would also change hands, and these privacy policies could change as well.
Speed
7.8/10
While you may get your results pretty quickly, certain aspects of the myLAB Box experience could happen faster. We reached out to the company with a few basic questions about their tests, mostly regarding STD screening. It took nearly five days to get an answer, and that’s only after we persisted through a bit of a runaround.
Fortunately, myLAB Box delivers on the speedy availability of results, usually within 2-5 days after returning your kit to the lab. This depends on where you reside and which tests you purchased. Every box includes free shipping in both directions, with two-day shipping to you. Our testers’ kits took a little longer to arrive — five days instead of two via FedEx — but this was at the height of late 2021 Covid complications, so we’re willing to cut them some slack.
Our testers dropped their samples off at the post office on a Tuesday afternoon, and most of those tests made it to the labs by that Sunday with results in their inboxes by Tuesday. All told, it took an average of 15 days from ordering to results. One tester never received a confirmation that the lab had received their test, but results came back nevertheless.
Customer care
7.3/10
myLAB Box offers two ways to get in touch with them: email and phone. In our experience, the customer representatives were fine to deal with, but they were short on answers to a number of our questions. They asked that we email those questions in instead. So we did, but we never got a response.
Instead, we called again a few days later and were mystified to hear the outgoing message recommend a live chat option on the website. We returned to the website and could not find a live chat option. Perhaps there was once such an option, and they hadn’t updated their phone message since they did away with it. Whatever the cause, we listened on, and no one was there to answer our call. There was no option to hold, but we could leave a message.
A few hours later, one of our testers got a call back from an unfamiliar Canadian number, but he screened it. Moments after that, a text came through from myLAB Box apologizing for having missed us.
Missing that call turned out to be something of a blessing, though, as the follow-up text opened a kind of live chat option through which we were able to have most of our questions answered. The answers came back slowly, but they came.
All of this is to say that the company has mechanisms to provide excellent customer care, but they’re too disjointed to be as effective as we would like.
