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Specification complete. Expert review across lived experience, clinical training, and AI-integrated care. Two international design partners have completed the Early Innovators process.
use PROM/PREM each session with the service user, to guide care with predictive progress feedback
access deliberate practice data for alliance monitoring, reflective skill development, and structure
decisions, funding accountability supported by session, caseload, and population reporting
in psychotherapy or counselling, including those accessing digital and AI-assisted services
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Worldwide, most people seeking mental health care present with anxiety and/or depressive symptoms, which commonly load onto a shared internalizing/general distress factor. More severe disorders are a smaller proportion of total cases. Thus, the largest opportunity for system-wide impact often lies in improving treatment for anxiety and depression.
Yet widely used symptom measures such as PHQ-9 and GAD-7 were developed and normed primarily in high-income, Western populations, even though most of the global mental health burden occurs in low- and middle-income countries. This creates a persistent representational gap: globally scaled tools rest on comparatively narrow development populations.
MyTOMS is designed to be community-governed, not vendor-controlled. Scales and reporting tools are free and embeddable in any EHR or digital platform — removing cost and licensing as barriers. The TOMS certification curriculum is proprietary, meeting existing clinical training budgets rather than creating new procurement barriers.
Holistic Research Canada is a self-founded social enterprise; MyTOMS is mission-driven, not investor-driven. A dedicated MyTOMS page is live at holisticresearchcanada.ca. Cindy Hansen is available for consultation on implementation, validation partnerships, and integration design.
The solution is to measure what generalizes. Decades of feedback-informed treatment and routine outcome monitoring research show that common therapeutic factors — functioning, alliance, client experience — predict outcomes across cultural and diagnostic contexts. Because they reflect shared processes of care rather than culture-bound symptoms, they transfer across languages, service models, and health systems.
Common factors become a viable basis for common data elements beyond narrow development populations. MyTOMS removes licensing as a barrier — scales and reporting tools are open-source under CC BY 4.0 — and translates analytic sophistication into legible patterns and cues that strengthen functioning, alliance, and client experience.
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