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Each day across Canada, police officers respond to emergency calls involving mental health issues. This can result in complex, potentially volatile situations where an officer’s ability to respond effectively is crucial.
To help address this challenge, University of Waterloo psychology graduate Daniel Pearson Hirdes and computer science graduate Daniel MacKenzie created HealthIM. The data-driven platform allows officers to record their encounters with the public in clinical language and to then send information to their partners in healthcare organizations. The goal is to ensure that with the right information, officers will take the most empathetic steps to address mental health problems.
The technology’s development follows growing public concern over how police officers respond to mental health-related calls. A recent investigation found that the majority of people who have died during police encounters across the country since 2000 suffered from mental health problems or symptoms of substance abuse.
Pearson Hirdes, MacKenzie and their team created the tool to equip officers with better understanding of mental illness and how to react to it, using the evidence-based “Brief Mental Health Screener”. The company was supported during their early days by Velocity, the University of Waterloo’s startup incubator, and the Waterloo region’s innovation ecosystem as a whole.
The HealthIM platform is currently being used in 21 different police services and RCMP detachments in Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. An additional 19 police Services and RCMP detachments are coming online in the next year including police services in British Columbia and North Carolina.
Among them is the police service in Brantford, Ontario, which receives between 2,500 and 3,000 emergency calls per year – or seven to ten calls per day – in which mental health is a contributing factor, according to Geoff Nelson, Chief of police.
Nelson says his team began working with HealthIM in 2014. While his officers were already receiving a great deal of mental health-related training from specialists in their community, he says the HealthIM system has supplemented this knowledge in unique ways.
“As the officers began using the platform, they became more comfortable with the terminology,” Nelson says. “Just by virtue of using the application, I think their knowledge and understanding of mental health increased.”
Officers can use HealthIM from their workstations or mobile devices, and they are prompted to answer a series of structured questions about the individual in crisis. The platform provides detailed explanations for clinical language used in the questions, to ensure accurate understanding. This is notably important considering community mental health agencies, doctors and nursing staff, hospitals, and police officers in the field all use different terminology to describe behaviours they observe during mental health crisis calls, Pearson Hirdes says.
In the past, “officers would … write down their observations in a notepad,” which led to “a lack of standardization between how different officers might respond to these calls,” Pearson Hirdes says.
Officers can use HealthIM’s Brief Mental Health Screener (BMHS) from their workstations or on their mobile phonesSUPPLIED
“Providing accurate information can go a long way to providing better care for the individuals involved, so everyone understands the situation in the same terms,” he says.
Once questions are answered, the tool employs algorithms to calculate the likelihood that an individual will harm themselves, harm others or fail to care for themselves. Officers can use these results to inform their on-scene decision-making about the best next step for that person, be it connecting them to support services or transporting them to a hospital for psychiatric support.
When that decision is made, the system sends the officer's observations in an encrypted package to the receiving healthcare facility.
Katy Kamkar, a clinical psychologist with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, says it is important for police to have adequate mental health training so they can recognize signs and symptoms in the field and “optimize the care” they connect individuals with – including early intervention.
She notes that having more knowledge on how to handle mental health crises also contributes to officers’ own wellbeing.
“When you have received the proper training and education and the skills to perform your job, it helps reduce your overall stress as well,” Dr. Kamkar says. “Your work productivity goes up, your work competencies go up. When you feel more equipped, then you feel more confident.”
While the HealthIM team hopes to grow the system across the country, Pearson Hirdes stresses that this kind of technology can never replace the efforts and insights of the people using it.
“We have really passionate, strong individuals in our community who work in policing and in health and support organizations,” he says. “It’s about augmenting their ability to do the job they do every day and helping them communicate together.”
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