[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"insight-from-research-to-code":3,"story-from-research-to-code":193},{"id":4,"title":5,"author":6,"authorBio":7,"authorJobTitle":8,"authorSlug":9,"body":10,"category":191,"description":16,"eventEndDate":193,"eventLocation":193,"eventOrganizer":193,"eventStartDate":193,"eventVenue":193,"excerpt":193,"extension":194,"featured":195,"heroBg":193,"heroBgSvg":193,"image":196,"imageHeight":197,"imageWidth":198,"meta":199,"navigation":200,"path":201,"publishedAt":202,"seo":203,"slug":204,"status":205,"stem":206,"tags":207,"type":214,"updatedAt":215,"__hash__":216},"insights\u002Finsights\u002Ffrom-research-to-code.md","From research to code: how the University of Victoria shaped HiBoop's clinical brain","Madeline Geneau","Madeline Geneau is Director of Client Services at HiBoop, where she works closely with clinics to ensure every practice gets the most out of measurement-based care.","Director of Client Services, HiBoop","madeline-geneau",{"type":11,"value":12,"toc":181},"minimark",[13,17,23,26,29,32,37,40,48,51,54,59,61,65,68,71,79,82,85,88,90,94,97,100,103,106,109,111,115,118,121,124,127,130,132,136,139,142,145,148,150,154,157,160,163,166,171,173],[14,15,16],"p",{},"I talk to clinicians every day. And one thing I hear constantly, almost universally, is some version of this:",[18,19,20],"blockquote",{},[14,21,22],{},"I know I should be doing more structured assessment. I just don't always have the bandwidth to remember everything I'm supposed to be checking for.",[14,24,25],{},"That sentence is not an admission of failure. It is a description of reality. Clinicians carry an enormous amount of information in their heads, comorbidity rates, risk thresholds, demographic factors that should shape what gets asked and in what order. They are also, usually, seeing back-to-back clients. The cognitive load is real, and it compounds across the day.",[14,27,28],{},"This is what the partnership with the University of Victoria Psychology Clinic was really about. Not marketing. Not validation for its own sake. But the question: can we build a tool that holds some of that weight for clinicians, one that doesn't miss things even when the person using it is tired?",[30,31],"hr",{},[33,34,36],"h2",{"id":35},"what-evidence-based-software-actually-means","What \"evidence-based software\" actually means",[14,38,39],{},"You will have seen \"evidence-based\" on every clinical platform website you have ever visited. It is one of those phrases that means everything and nothing at the same time.",[14,41,42,43,47],{},"What it should mean is this: every recommendation the system makes can be traced back to a specific piece of research. Not a general sense that the tool is \"clinically grounded.\" A specific ",[44,45,46],"code",{},"if\u002Fthen"," rule derived from a specific finding, reviewed by people who know the literature.",[14,49,50],{},"That is what Dr. Jill Robinson and Cole Smith at UVic gave us. They did not just audit the platform. They mapped the relationships between assessments, dug into the comorbidity literature, and showed us exactly where our logic was vague where it should have been precise.",[14,52,53],{},"What follows is what we found, and what changed.",[18,55,56],{},[14,57,58],{},"\"In clinical software, a guess is a hallucination. What the UVic partnership gave us was a system that does not guess, it follows rigid, peer-reviewed logic paths that can be traced back to a specific finding. That traceability is not just good clinical practice. It is the difference between defensible documentation and a liability.\"",[30,60],{},[33,62,64],{"id":63},"the-thing-clinicians-miss-most","The thing clinicians miss most",[14,66,67],{},"If I had to name the pattern I hear about most from the clinicians I work with, it is this: they catch the obvious thing and miss what is sitting right next to it.",[14,69,70],{},"ADHD is the clearest example. It is identifiable. It has a strong presentation. It is easy to name and easy to stop looking beyond. But the data on what travels alongside ADHD is striking, and in a busy intake, it is genuinely easy to forget.",[72,73],"comorbidity-chart",{":items":74,":maxValue":75,"source":76,"subtitle":77,"title":78},"[{\"label\":\"Major Depressive Disorder\",\"value\":22},{\"label\":\"Bipolar Disorder\",\"value\":24.8},{\"label\":\"Generalized Anxiety Disorder\",\"value\":31.5},{\"label\":\"Autism Spectrum Disorder\",\"value\":59,\"highlight\":true}]","70","Peer-reviewed literature; UVic Psychology Clinic comorbidity analysis","Conditions that co-occur with ADHD, by frequency","ADHD Co-occurrence Rates",[14,80,81],{},"That last number, 59%, stops people when I share it. More than half of patients presenting with ADHD may also be on the Autism spectrum. Nearly a third may have underlying generalized anxiety that is getting missed. And Bipolar disorder, if treated as Unipolar depression with antidepressants alone, carries real safety risk.",[14,83,84],{},"No clinician is unaware of comorbidity. But knowing it in theory and remembering it at 4pm on a Thursday are different things.",[14,86,87],{},"So HiBoop now responds to a high ASRS score by automatically working through the sequence: RAADS-R for Autism, then GAD-7 for anxiety, MDQ for Bipolar, PHQ-9 for depression, in that order, weighted by probability. The clinician still decides what to do. But the prompt is there, every time, regardless of how the day is going.",[30,89],{},[33,91,93],{"id":92},"when-a-number-is-just-sitting-in-a-file","When a number is just sitting in a file",[14,95,96],{},"ACE scores are everywhere in trauma-informed care. Most clinics collect them. Far fewer have them wired into what happens next.",[14,98,99],{},"In a paper-based workflow, an ACE score of 6 gets written down. It might inform the clinician's understanding of a patient. But it rarely changes what gets asked at the next appointment.",[14,101,102],{},"The UVic research confirmed what CDC data has long shown: the relationship between ACE scores and downstream risk is not subtle. An ACE score of 4 or more is associated with significantly elevated risk across substance use, depression, trauma, and serious physical health conditions. It is not just a flag, it is a clinical signal that should change the intake.",[14,104,105],{},"HiBoop now treats it that way. A score of 4 or higher automatically surfaces substance use screening, depression tools, and trauma assessments. The intake trajectory shifts in real time, rather than waiting for a clinician to connect the dots in a follow-up appointment.",[14,107,108],{},"One of the things I find most meaningful about this is what it means for patients who might not have the language to flag these connections themselves. The system is looking for them, even when no one thinks to ask.",[30,110],{},[33,112,114],{"id":113},"assessment-that-knows-who-its-talking-to","Assessment that knows who it's talking to",[14,116,117],{},"This is the piece of the UVic collaboration I am most proud of, honestly.",[14,119,120],{},"Standard assessment tools are designed to be context-agnostic. That is the point, comparability. But that comparability has a cost. It tends to flatten the things that matter most for certain patients, particularly when what matters is not what is wrong but what resources someone has to recover.",[14,122,123],{},"For Indigenous patients, that distinction is clinical, not philosophical. The concept of Recovery Capital, social support, community connection, cultural identity, historical context, is often more prognostically relevant than a symptom score. Western deficit-based screeners were not built to surface it.",[14,125,126],{},"The ARC and BARC-10 were. They ask different questions: about community, about belonging, about cultural practices. They are not adapted tools. They are the right tools.",[14,128,129],{},"HiBoop now surfaces them automatically when a patient identifies as Indigenous. It is a small rule, practically. But what it says is that the system knows where it is and who it is serving, and it responds accordingly.",[30,131],{},[33,133,135],{"id":134},"the-body-is-often-the-first-to-speak","The body is often the first to speak",[14,137,138],{},"Last one, and maybe the most underappreciated.",[14,140,141],{},"A lot of people who are struggling psychologically do not present to a mental health clinic first. They go to their GP with fatigue. They go to a university health centre with chronic headaches. They describe physical symptoms because those are the symptoms they have words for.",[14,143,144],{},"The PHQ-15 captures how heavy that somatic burden is. And the research is clear: high somatic scores correlate strongly with depression and generalized anxiety. The physical presentation is often the first chapter of a mental health story.",[14,146,147],{},"HiBoop now treats a PHQ-15 score of 10 or above as a prompt to screen for both, automatically surfacing PHQ-9 and GAD-7 alongside the somatic assessment. The clinician sees the full picture, not just the presenting complaint.",[30,149],{},[33,151,153],{"id":152},"what-this-actually-changes","What this actually changes",[14,155,156],{},"None of this replaces the clinician. I want to be clear about that, because it matters.",[14,158,159],{},"Every recommendation HiBoop makes is a prompt, a tap on the shoulder, not a directive. The clinician sees it, evaluates it, and decides. What changes is that the prompt is there every time, for every patient, regardless of schedule or cognitive load. The standard of care does not vary based on whether it is a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon.",[14,161,162],{},"That consistency is the thing. And it is what I find most useful to explain to the clinics I work with: this is not about the software being smarter than the clinician. It is about removing the variance. Making sure the things worth checking get checked, every time, traceably, with the research behind them.",[14,164,165],{},"Dr. Robinson and Cole Smith gave us the rigour to make that true. We are grateful for it.",[18,167,168],{},[14,169,170],{},"\"The standard of care does not vary based on whether it is a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon. That consistency is the whole point.\"",[30,172],{},[14,174,175,176],{},"Want to see the logic in action? ",[177,178,180],"a",{"href":179},"\u002Ftrial\u002F","Start a free trial.",{"title":182,"searchDepth":183,"depth":183,"links":184},"",2,[185,186,187,188,189,190],{"id":35,"depth":183,"text":36},{"id":63,"depth":183,"text":64},{"id":92,"depth":183,"text":93},{"id":113,"depth":183,"text":114},{"id":134,"depth":183,"text":135},{"id":152,"depth":183,"text":153},[192],"clinical-insights",null,"md",false,"\u002Fimg\u002Fcontent\u002Finsights\u002Fscience-behind.webp",630,1200,{},true,"\u002Finsights\u002Ffrom-research-to-code","2026-03-18T09:00:00Z",{"title":5,"description":16},"from-research-to-code","published","insights\u002Ffrom-research-to-code",[208,209,210,211,212,213],"research","algorithm","deterministic-ai","comorbidity","uvic","clinical-decision-support","post","2026-03-25T09:00:00Z","RRkHte7mz-OREu1GxO5qw1R5w2gMYtMjC9PgaI5frMY"]