The Trimbos Institute

Utrecht, NL

I paid a visit to the Trimbos Institute in Utrecht on an invitation from Katherina Martin-Abello, the director of the I.COM department (Innovation Centre of Mental Health & Technology). In September, we met at Stanford, where she presented the ‘Visual Screener’ - a graphic tool for assessing one’s mood and a potential mechanism for daily evaluating a patient’s health status.

DR. MARTIN-ABELO GAVE A PRESENTATION OF THE VISUAL SCREENER AT STANFORD

I was again presented with the Visual Screener, this time with fine-grained details. It promises a better way of interacting with patients, allows for interactivity, helps the visually impaired and elderly; factors in the transferability to other settings and general scalability, while allowing for some ethnic/gender/age customization. It has a ‘stickiness’ potential as the questions/cartoons can vary on daily basis and bring in the element of surprise.

In a nutshell, the 6 researchers I met with work on quite similar topics as I am: barriers to e-health implementation, behavior change by technology, cost-effectiveness modeling, use of mobile devices in healthcare, cross-cultural studies, transferability, etc. They work with UVIT and Achmea, and collaborate with Prof. Bert Vrijhoef from Tilburg University, so I guess it was just a matter of time before we would run into each other.

THE TRIMBOS INSTITUTE IN UTRECHT

Filip Smith, a health economist, presented the research on modeling healthcare expenditures used by the Dutch Government, the Australian Government, and the WHO. It is precisely what Prof. Hans Severens from Erasmus University and I work on. I have asked for more information in the form of papers and presentations that I would like to run with the stakeholders.

We have discussed the success factors of their endeavors and some of those findings can be quite useful for my projects – like the anonymity of their users at ‘Minder drinken’ platform or how to model for economic data on top of the clinical trials. I sure learned a couple of things.

In conclusion, I believe that the Visual Screener has great potential. Trimbos Institute is also strong in the domain of serious gaming as they already have some digital environments and projects that run in correctional facilities in the Netherlands. I believe that they could be a valuable partner to healthcare organizations as they claim to have proven solutions for behavior change and the adherence of patients.