Digital helps better
Digitally transforming the healthcare industry: To accurately understand people and their mental health problems, therapists use elaborate tests that take a lot of time and create huge volumes of documents. The startup insight.out has a solution.
“Just look at all these binders,” Jan Spilski says. The psychologist, wearing a shirt, jeans, and white sneakers, takes some thick binders filled with psychological tests from the shelf and heaves them onto the large conference table. “We have to purchase, evaluate, and store shelves upon shelves of these binders – it’s insane,” says Spilski.
The Scientific Coordinator at the Center for Cognitive Sciences at the Rhineland-Palatinate Technical University Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU) has probably evaluated thousands of such tests by hand – and knows that these procedures cost a lot of time and energy in many areas of healthcare. There is the depression questionnaire, the Beck Hopelessness Scale, the painDETECT pain questionnaire, and the biographical questionnaire for those dependent on alcohol. In practice, these tests are known as “paper-and-pencil tests” because they are filled out on paper and also scored in a similarly analog manner.
There are many disadvantages to this analog testing system. The binders take up physical space, and the evaluation of the tests is time-consuming and therefore expensive. Oftentimes, smaller practices in particular do not have time for this. Another problem, Spilski explains, is that “the health insurance companies only pay a small lump sum for the evaluation, which doesn’t even come close to covering the actual costs.” He notes that some important tests, such as for pain assessment, cannot be carried out at all. What’s more, specialists in high demand, such as those working in the area of psychotherapy, have to put people in need on the waiting list because of the paperwork involved.
„With the testbox, we bring professional standardized diagnostics to the smallest practices.“
The Kaiserslautern-based startup insight.out developed their so-called testbox to solve this array of problems. The idea for the startup came from Franca-Alexandra Rupprecht, a computer scientist and expert in human-computer interaction. A few years ago, Rupprecht was looking for a testing procedures tool that could digitally process measurement results and biofeedback in real-time. “With the testbox, we bring professional standardized diagnostics to the smallest practices,” says co-founder Andreas Schneider, describing the innovation. testbox is an online platform that allows therapists and doctors to directly purchase various test procedures, perform them digitally, and have them evaluated automatically.
Practices can purchase the testbox starting from 25 euros per month, plus license fees for a few procedures, but most are license-free. Patients complete the tests on a tablet, or the therapist guides them through the process. “With just a few clicks, therapists get results that they can use to guide their therapy,” Schneider says.
In November 2020, the young company won the “Pioniergeist” startup award, and further support from the state of Rhineland-Palatinate followed. In the previous year, the bank Investitions- und Strukturbank Rheinland-Pfalz (ISB) came on board as an investor, and now the startup is looking to grow.
insight.out currently offers more than 200 standardized tests. The team led by Rupprecht and her co-founders Schneider and Spilski is also developing its own neuropsychological tests. One example is an app that allows preschool and early school-age children to do writing exercises on a tablet – similar to a digital paint program. The app detects whether children have problems with hand-eye coordination or cramped arm muscles, for example, and parents can then respond with exercises or seek professional help. “This simple app helps prevent problems that sometimes accompany children throughout their school years,” Rupprecht says.