Two Centre Wellington District High School graduates have developed a software program that fills a gap in how people with mental illness are assessed by first responders.
Daniel Pearson Hirdes and Daniel MacKenzie, both 23, graduated from the University of Waterloo in June and are working full time on HealthIM, the software program they founded about two years ago.
HealthIM gives police officers prepared assessment questions for calls involving a person with a mental illness. The software summarizes the information and translates police observations into clinical language, and sends the report to the hospital before the patient’s arrival.
“This isn’t meant to replace the officer’s decision making,” Pearson Hirdes said. “It’s not meant to replace the decision making on the hospital side either, but it’s meant to be one more information source that’s a reliable source.”
With many current systems, officers transport the person with a mental illness to the hospital and then participate in an interview with a nurse.
“Which would basically be the officer describing what he or she saw from the field and it may not necessarily be in that clinical language, which is kind of a big gap for them,” Pearson Hirdes said. “What we’re hoping … is that we’re translating what they saw into clinical terms so the nurse can know exactly what happened on the scene.”
The program also allows officers to do a risk analysis in the field and assess the person’s state in comparison to the rest of the population.
With Pearson Hirdes’s degree in psychology and business with a specialization in digital communications, and MacKenzie’s degree in computer science, business and computer engineering, the pair decided in their second year that they wanted to work together.
“I had some technical skills and Dan had some experience with user interface design and so we wanted to do something,” MacKenzie said.
Through health care industry contacts, the pair got in touch with Dr. Ron Hoffman, former mental health trainer at the Ontario Police College, who was completing his PhD at the University of Waterloo.
“(His) thesis was on a screening tool to help police officers to gather observations during mental health situations.” MacKenzie explained. “So we … learned more about what he was doing and … he wanted to do something more with it and we thought there’s actually a really good opportunity here that we can actually work together and build something, build a platform and actually take this to do some real good for the police forces across Ontario and Canada.”
HealthIM uses Hoffman’s BMHS (brief mental health screener) to provide the questions necessary for officers in the field to evaluate people with mental illness. Hoffman is now an associate fellow of interRAI Canada, a international not-for-profit research group working to develop assessment tools for health practitioners.
The two HealthIM founders are members of the Velocity Garage in Waterloo, which is a free start-up incubator for University of Waterloo students. They won $25,000 through the Velocity Finals Fund on Nov. 26, which will go towards growing their team and getting in touch with more police forces.
Right now the company consists of the “two Dans” and a part-time student, with masters students completing research.
“We’re starting to take a serious look at what are the implications for family health teams in the communities or for paramedic services or for fire services as well,” Pearson Hirdes said. “This is information that is very useful to any emergency responder essentially and there may be opportunities for that in the future.”
The duo also hopes information will be easily shared between police forces.
“Maybe Brantford’s doing a really good job of responding to people who have depression and then we can share what they’ve done with the other police services and raise the response across the board by pointing out exceptional cases,” said Pearson Hirdes.
HealthIM was piloted at the Niagara Regional Police Service in September 2014. The software was run on a tablet in the hospital and officers answered questions when they were already in the building.
“There was a lot of short comings with that in the sense that we weren’t getting the data back to the police as easy and we weren’t able to do the risk analysis out in the field which really drives decision making,” Pearson Hirdes said. “So that was kind of a proof of concept.”
The program is currently being rolled out completely by Brantford Police Service.
“The officers … are using it out in the field … doing live reporting with the local hospital site and the community mental health agencies,” Pearson Hirdes explained.
The founders said it’s the potential for positive change in the community and the application of their unique skills that make them so passionate about HealthIM.
“[Mental health] seems like a really big issue and it’s developing, we kind of see this as a really good application of our skills, we’ve seen this problem, we can develop a solution for it, we can try and help bring positive change to the communities,” MacKenzie said.
Pearson Hirdes said, “the key take away we want people to be looking at here is what we’re working on is a preventative measure for the police, so stopping those crisis situations from happening before they actually occur, getting the police and the community mental health agencies involved in a meaningful way before those crisis situations occur.
“And we’re synchronizing the communication between all the organizations and communities to improve the quality of care for everyone across the board.”
