BC Business
HiBoop's CEO Jason Morehouse says the technology was born out of his own struggles accessing mental health care
Access to timely and effective mental health care in the province can be difficult. It’s estimated that around one million British Columbians will experience a mental illness each year.
In B.C., many are paying for mental health care in the most expensive way possible. Because individuals often aren’t receiving the right treatment, they’re stuck paying large amounts of money testing out a range of services and care.
Jason Morehouse’s journey was long and costly as well. It took him nearly 40 years and significant out-of-pocket expenses to receive a full diagnosis.
“I had to pay lots of money to even get that attention,” he says. “And then I did all the things I was told to do—the cognitive therapies, medication… Nobody has 80 grand to figure out where their brain is at. It’s just not right.”
Motivated by his own challenges accessing mental health care, Morehouse founded HiBoop, a digital platform designed to deliver faster, evidence-based mental health assessments. Unlike other pre-screening tools that tend to only focus on symptoms, HiBoop connects coping disorders (e.g. anxiety, self-harm, substance abuse) with potential underlying problems.
In 2024, the company ran a successful pilot program with five clinics across B.C., Alberta and Ontario. The program received positive feedback from the clinics with a 94 percent satisfaction rate.
Morehouse points out that most general practitioners (GPs) are trained to deal with physical health care but are facing an increase in mental health-related cases. As a result, GPs are less likely to be equipped with the necessary tools and skills to fully understand each patient or make appropriate referrals.
In feedback for the pilot program, clinics stated that the new technology helped streamline processes and improve decision-making when assigning patients to various treatments. Following its success, the company is now launching the beta stage of its assessment platform to the broader market and is available to clinics and healthcare providers across Canada for early access.
HiBoop uses a self-guided assessment that incorporates clinically trusted tests like the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 and the Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagnostic Scale-Revised questionnaire. This assessment screens for a variety of conditions such as ADHD, depression, and dissociation. The results are sent to mental health clinics and care providers in the form of concise reports that highlight the patient’s symptoms before appointments, allowing for more targeted care from the get-go.
“We can’t solve everything, but we want to solve a portion of the problem,” says Morehouse. “I just felt it was unjust that we have to wait for a crisis for our healthcare to intervene.”