New spin-off from ULiège, Tool2Care, is in the process of completing its first crowdfunding

Tool2Care, the latest spin-off of the University of Liège in the field of Human and Social Sciences, is about to complete its first crowdfunding following its call for contributors, launched in April. The objective is to create a simple and transparent collaborative plaform to improve psychological and logopaedic care while allowing clinicians to easily apply the "Evidence-Based Practice" (EBP) approach.

EBP consists of a reflective posture combining, on a daily basis, four elements:

• the clinician's expertise ;
• scientifically validated 'evidence';
• the characteristics, preferences and values of each individual patient;
• the organisational and environmental context of clinical practice.

This approach is very demanding for clinicians, since it requires, among other things, questioning the research regularly while being confronted with the difficulty of accessing scientific information, its sometimes indigestible nature and the time-consuming process of its analysis.

Sylvie Willems (neuropsychologist) and Jonathan Burnay (psychologist and psychotherapist) first identified the difficulties that clinicians were encountering in implementing this EBP approach. They then developed "Tool2Care", a platform that is eagerly awaited by the sector, which responds to the obstacles identified by clinicians and to the requirements of the "Quality of Care" law, to be applied from July 2022. The project leader and founder, Sylvie Willems, says: "Psychologists and speech therapists must have easy access to evidence in order to provide effective care to their patients. Universities have a role to play in synthesising these resources. The development of the project took place within the Clinique Psychologique et Logopédique Universitaire (CPLU) and with the financial support of the Walloon Region. The team has been joined at the end of 2021 by Lorraine Lieffrig (speech therapist) and Johann Schreurs (IT specialist).

Tool2Care's functionality is built around a collection of assessment tools. It allows, via a simple keyword search, to find a list of tools. All the tools listed are analysed on several dimensions in order to give clinicians all the necessary information. These analyses are based on the available data concerning the quality of the tools, i.e. their psychometric data. The synthesis of these analyses thus allows the clinician to select the most relevant tool quickly. As stated above, the clinician thus meets the new legislative requirements. "In the field, it is extremely difficult for the psychologist or speech therapist to know the quality of the assessment tools they use. As this is essential for the quality of care, we wanted to provide a practical solution", explains Jonathan Burnay.

The originality of the project also lies in the status of the spin-off. Resulting from the CPLU, Tool2care was created in April 2022 as a cooperative. The team chose this status because it is the one that comes closest to the values of Tool2Care: notably sharing and ethics. It allows to involve the main stakeholders in the governance of the company, to make them contribute to the development of the online tools and to their quality. All this in a democratic way, in the interest of all and giving priority to the improvement of health care. Tool2Care thus becomes, after Cytomine in 2017, the 2^e cooperative resulting from the laboratories of the University of Liege.

Didier Mattivi, director of the Interface Entreprises - ULiège, underlines: "Tool2care is a good example of valorization of research in the area of Human and Social Sciences. In the future, we want to strengthen the emergence and support of innovative projects in this field. They are still too marginal. However, interesting outlets exist with civil society actors: independent workers, companies, associations and local authorities. Together with public and private partners, we need to deploy an adapted and ambitious ecosystem at the service of researchers in order to highlight the potential of socio-economic valorisation in SHS and to increase the impact of this knowledge in society."

Still in the capitalisation phase, the spin-off has already received broad support as, less than a month after its launch, it has yet to find 20,000 euros out of the 120,000 euros required to launch the commercialisation of its platform.  

Support Tool2Care and become a cooperator: https://tool2care.org/devenir-cooperateur/

Photo copyright : Charlotte Delleur