Case study: creating an online platform for remote psychological consultancy

During the time of social distancing, the businesses have to transition their work to online space. Some of them have already been quite prepared and had a viable infrastructure for remote working and distance communication with their employees. For the other ones, the recent months have become the challenging time with the forced and drastic change of workflow and communication with the customers. In this article, we will tell you about our recent case — a psychotherapy consultancy centre that has implemented their custom platform for handling remote sessions.

Customer’s request

Our customers have already practised online consultancy — the psychotherapists communicated with the customers via Skype and all the customer information was stored in their internal system. That wasn’t really convenient for them — there was no synchronization between these channels, and the specialists had to spend some time filling the customer information in the internal system.

They hired a web development studio to develop an application for Android & iOS and web platforms. They had the following requirements to its functionality:

• High-quality video connection for online 1–1 session
• Support of group & conference calls for group therapy
• Text chat & file sharing
• The ability for the psychotherapists to manage the customer profiles for tracking their progress and to make notes while the consultations

Implementation

It was decided to write the application on Flutter since it was meant to be cross-platform. The psychological consultancy imposed limited deadlines, so the dev agency decided to use the ready-made tools from QuickBlox Flutter SDK, instead of building the app from scratch. With the help of our tools, the following features were implemented:

• 1–1 video calls for individual sessions
• Group video calls for sessions in small groups (up to 4 participants)
• Video conference calls for large group therapy (up to 12 participants)
• 1–1 & group chat with file sharing
• User management options with convenient system of monitoring the progress of each particular customer

When the centre had to switch to fully remote work, they added several internal chats for the staff to be connected during this period. Thus, there was a convenient way for each psychologist to get the consultations from the supervisor.

Conclusion

This case study demonstrates that even such a delicate area as psychotherapy that relies on live human communication, can easily adapt to the new conditions and continue providing quality emotional help to their customers. Stay connected even despite the social distancing — today it is even more important than ever.