HiBoop Announces Partnership with the University of Victoria

There are tools built on intuition, and tools built on evidence. We have always wanted HiBoop to be the latter: a platform where every recommendation has a reason, and every reason can be traced back to research.

Earlier this year, we took a significant step toward that goal. We partnered with Jill Robinson, Ph.D., R.Psych, Clinical Director at the University of Victoria Psychology Clinic, and Cole Smith, Research Assistant, to put our recommendation logic under the microscope.

The result is a meaningful upgrade to how HiBoop thinks, and a partnership we are genuinely proud of.

Why an academic partnership matters

HiBoop's recommendation engine is what sets us apart. When a clinician administers an assessment, the platform doesn't just score it; it interprets the result in clinical context and suggests what to assess next. That is the core of measurement-based care done well, and that logic needs to be right.

Getting it right means going beyond what any one clinical team knows. It means leaning on peer-reviewed research, population-level data, and the kind of rigorous analysis that a dedicated research team can provide.

The UVic Psychology Clinic operates on what the field calls the scientist-practitioner model: a CPA-accredited training environment where research and clinical work are not separate tracks but the same activity. The clinic serves real patients from the greater Victoria community: children, adults, couples, and families. Indigenous mental health is an active area of faculty research, not an afterthought. That combination of academic rigour, live clinical exposure, and specific depth in the populations most often underserved by standard assessment tools is what made this the right partnership.

UVic brought exactly that. Their team mapped the relationships between assessments, identified how demographic and contextual factors shape clinical outcomes, and showed us where our existing logic needed to be sharper. Those findings are now embedded in HiBoop's core algorithm.

What changed, and why it matters clinically

Comorbidity-driven recommendations

The most direct outcome of UVic's research is a much stronger model of how conditions co-occur, and how that should shape what gets assessed next.

ACE scores and cascading risk. An ACE score of 4 or more is associated with meaningfully elevated risk across a range of outcomes: depression, substance use, trauma, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and more. The link is well-established in the literature, but the question for us was: does our algorithm respond to it? It does now. A score of 4 or higher on the ACE automatically surfaces recommendations for substance use screening (ASSIST-V3 or TAPS), depression (PHQ-9 or DASS), and trauma (PCL-5 or PC-PTSD-5).

ADHD and its frequent companions. The comorbidity picture is equally striking, co-occurrence rates for autism, anxiety, bipolar, and depression are summarized in the Research lane below. We use those rates to weight our recommendations by clinical priority. In practice: a high ASRS score now triggers RAADS-R, GAD-7, MDQ, and PHQ-9, in that order.

Five further changes landed in the algorithm, risk-tiered sequencing, demographic sensitivity, clinical-context awareness, recovery and function tracking, and mind–body intersections. The full clinical write-up lives in Inside the UVic research.

The algorithm is not replacing clinical judgment. It is informing it. Every recommendation is a prompt for the clinician, not a prescription. But the prompts are now grounded in evidence in a way they weren't before.

Learn more about the University of Victoria Psychology Clinic.