Revolutionising Mental Healthcare Through an Intuitive Patient-therapist Platform

When the pandemic hit, the demand for mental health services increased significantly, causing a massive spike in traffic for the client. The platform virtually connected therapists to patients and with this surge, the client realised a noticeable gap in the scalability and cost-effectiveness of the platform.

They quickly assessed the existing infrastructure and performance issues and listed the following concerns that needed to be addressed:

• The patient portal needed to be completely rebuilt in anticipation of the scaling up demands in the future which seemed like a challenge with the current portal.
• Patients faced various challenges like time-outs, down-times while logging in, managing appointments, and connecting with therapists which caused a decline in user engagement.
• The patient portal used Microsoft Azure’s cloud services which was expensive.
• The therapists needed an intuitive platform where they could easily manage and schedule appointments, access health records or prescribe medications.

The client wanted to offer seamless patient-therapist experiences through an intuitive, user-friendly and cost-effective centralised solution. They were eyeing a round of funding and needed to showcase incremental progress to its potential investors.

The client chose Symv, because of our expertise in modern cloud engineering, designing solutions, extensive knowledge in crafting digital experiences, and our UI/UX prowess.

The product vision required the platform to be reimagined and built from scratch. The compressed timeline of only 4 months meant that the team needed to act fast.

The project was assigned to an experienced engineering team comprising Technical Leads, UI Experts, Frontend Engineers, Backend Engineers, and DevOps Engineers. After interactive sessions and brainstorming with the primary stakeholders, the team proposed that the solution should be divided into 2 phases.

Phase 1: Improving scalability and performance of the patient portal:

• The team first chose the tech stack - React.js, Next.js, Node.js with Nest.js framework, and AWS as the cloud platform - which was flexible, and easy to scale with the growing needs of the platform.
• The team then migrated the workload from Microsoft Azure to AWS since it was cost-intensive, offered limited flexibility and was difficult to scale. We set up repositories and deployment pipelines on AWS to manage the migration.
• We then moved away from the existing Angular app to a more efficiently built React and Next application
• Nest.js-based APIs were engineered to help migrate from the existing .NET backend to a more scalable Node.js backend
• We automated appointment scheduling by integrating Acuity Scheduling. This made the platform more intuitive, provided ease of setting/managing appointments and thus improved the user experience

Phase 2: Designing a centralized platform for therapists:

• To provide a seamless patient-therapist interaction, we set up the Welkin EHR which is a patient relationship management tool and integrated it with the backend
• To simplify setting up meetings for therapists, we integrated Acuity scheduling
• We built a webhook-based system on top of Welkin EHR and Acuity for convenient appointment scheduling
• A HIPAA-compliant database was set up to offer a connected patient-therapist experience
• To allow effortless prescription fulfilment and management, we engineered a pharmacy system using Truepill and Welkin EHR.

In a span of 4 months, the team blended technical expertise with the client’s product vision to deliver a transformative and seamless patient-therapist experience. We were able to transform the patient portal through which patients could seek assistance and access custom therapy plans. As for therapists, the portal served as a go-to solution which managed everything, allowing them to focus solely on their patient's well-being.