TeleMedicine Platform for Women’s Mental Health

About the client

The client is an American entrepreneur with 7+ years of experience building products in the tech field. He has launched a few successful startups  (including an e-reading app and a dating app), built up strong expertise in the tech market, and came up with an idea for another startup.

Client request

The client approached us with an idea for a marketplace that would connect therapists and people who need their help. The idea behind the marketplace was to enable people to take care of their mental health on the go, providing them with access to talk therapy at their fingertips. Wanting to make sure that his idea was backed up with solid expertise in the telehealth industry, the client decided to reach out to Itexus. The project began in January 2020, and by the end of March, we had already released an MVP called LifeHelp. But by early May, it became clear that the marketplace model wasn’t going to work. What remained unaddressed was the fact that the typical person looking for a counselor’s help isn’t at a point where they’re able to conduct an extensive search for a therapist, reading and comparing reviews and making tough choices — by the time they’ve decided to seek out therapy, they’re usually at a point where they need to get help right away. As a result, the client made the decision to pivot from creating a marketplace to a SaaS platform. The idea was to pass transfer the burden of finding a suitable counselor from the patient to the platform, which would utilize a chatbot to explore a user’s needs, goals, and pain points, after which it would shortlist three specialists for the patient to choose from. It was also decided that the target audience would be narrowed, catering specifically to women. These decisions would turn out to be a major turning point for LifeHelp.

Project challenges

After the MVP launch in March 2020, we saw that platform visitors were leaving at high numbers, leading to a bounce rate that was not satisfactory. We began to explore the problem, putting ourselves in the user’s shoes to see what our platform was like from their perspective.

• Changing business model

We had to change the business model and reinvent the platform concept and structure from scratch. Empathy for users was what ultimately helped us to come up with the idea of the subscription model — we created a platform that assumes the brunt of users’ responsibility and makes their lives easier.

• Settling issues with therapists’ licenses

As the purpose of LifeHelp was to deliver professional assistance for mental health, we needed to select experts in the field, verify their licenses, and settle legal issues. Currently, over 40 therapists work with the platform, and each of them meets LifeHelp’s high standards.

• Getting HIPAA compliance certificate

Another challenge lay in the specifics of the telehealth industry. People want the data they share to be secure, especially when it comes to a topic as sensitive as mental health. As such, it was crucial to provide a trouble-proof data security level, and we wanted to certify the platform with HIPAA compliance — a laborious and time-consuming process. Still, we felt that the benefits outweighed the cost; the HIPAA compliance certificate went a long way in proving LifeHelp’s trustworthiness.

Development process

The Itexus team began working on the initial marketplace product in January 2020 and released the MVP by the end of March. After several weeks of testing, we decided to pivot to the subscription model. By the end of that summer, we released the iOS and web applications and analyzed the product-market fit; the number of subscriptions in those first months after going live supported our hypothesis. The first block we focused on developing was the one that provided users with access to counselors, which was by far the top priority in terms of value-add for users and for revenue. The project is currently attracting additional investments; once the round is complete, we will resume the development of the network and content blocks.

Technical solution highlights

The specifics of the telehealth industry in general and mental health in particular imposed certain obligations on us as developers. We value our clients’ reputations highly and do everything we can to make sure that the end users of our products are protected and that their data is safe. So it was of key importance that the platform was capable of protecting users’ personal data, so that they wouldn’t have concerns regarding possible data leaks. It was also vital that the platform provided users with trouble-free access to their counselors’ help.

Results & Future Plans

The value of this solution is not only in the fact that telehealth platforms are in demand in the healthcare market but also in its social mission. According to KFF, the pandemic and its related limitations and economic recession negatively affected the mental health of millions of people. In a time when maintaining mental health is more challenging than ever before, LifeHelp provides a space for women to seek care for themselves, and also to support and uplift others. LifeHelp is currently live. For more information about this telehealth solution, go here. As soon as the startup secures funding, we will continue to work on the network and content blocks, improving the platform and, in turn, the lives of millions of women. Here at Itexus, we back up bright ideas with our solid expertise in healthcare software development. Feel free to reach out to us if you need an experienced, trustworthy, and enthusiastic partner who can help you make the world go round.