Jason Morehouse, founder of HiBoop. Photo: HiBoop.
While one in five Canadians will suffer from a mental health illness in any given year, it can take up to 12 months to get a diagnosis after the first symptom. After a patient receives a referral, the time it takes to receive care is typically six months, sometimes up to 18 months. Then, once treatment begins, subsequent sessions can take between one and four months.
The prolonged wait times are among the outcomes of Canada’s severe physician shortage. Healthcare providers are receiving more referrals than they can handle, and some are choosing to leave the public system for private in search of better pay.
Jason Morehouse, the founder of tourism software development company Checkfront, experienced the consequences firsthand. It wasn’t until his 40s that he was given a diagnosis and started treatment for ADHD, complex PTSD, and general anxiety disorder. When he first tried to get answers at a walk-in clinic years before, he was only offered medication that didn’t help.
The question of why it had to take so long kept percolating in his mind. So, when Checkfront completed a $80 million merger, he stepped down and founded HiBoop, a new mental health assessment platform to assist healthcare providers. Its goal is to cut diagnosis times and improve access to timely, personalized care. While it’s still beta testing, it’s already launched a pilot program with The Healing Institute — a treatment centre on Vancouver Island — to enhance its effectiveness and ensure it integrates smoothly into clinical practices.
The exterior of The Healing Institute. Photo: The Healing Institute.
How HiBoop works
“What we're trying to expedite with HiBoop is to give a preliminary assessment, so that providers can deal with those in sequence,” Morehouse tells the Victoria Tech Journal. “You cannot just medicate depression but that's what we do. We don't connect the dots. Trauma often drives a lot of this. And if people aren’t acknowledging it because they don't have specialists [...], then they will continue to suffer.”
HiBoop aims to make the assessment process for providers easier to manage. It consolidates decades of mental health research and methodologies and leverages an algorithm that generates scores across various conditions, like anxiety, depression, dissociation, and ADHD. The results are then used to create a patient’s holistic mental health profile and guide on the most appropriate care for them.
An example of a patient’s profile on desktop. Photo: HiBoop.
As for individuals, the tool is designed to make the diagnostic experience respectful, non-intrusive, and flexible. It considers where they are in their mental health journey based on the information provided and tailors questions to not be triggering or irrelevant. If the individual needs more time with their answers, HiBoop will send them a gentle nudge, inviting them to re-engage when they feel ready.
Soon, the platform will also allow individuals to track their mood over time by giving them the option to log their emotions between questionnaires. If any trends emerge, HiBoop will encourage patients to complete relevant assessments so that they can receive more timely and personalized care.
An example of an assessment on mobile. Photo: HiBoop.
Looking ahead
As for what can be expected next, HiBoop plans to expand beyond clinical settings and release a public version of the platform. It also hopes to not only provide individuals an accessible way to better understand their mental health, but help them identify underlying neurodivergent conditions that they may have. And as the company grows, it will remain based in Victoria.
“We have a great tech community, so our roots are here,” highlights Morehouse. “But we are going to go global. And that's just another way [...] to help the community moving forward. There's tons of great startups and we're committed to, at least from the outset, make this another Victoria success story.”