A mental health telemedicine app showing a mood journal and a video therapy session

iOS Telemedicine App for a Mental Health Startup Delivered in 4 Months

Industry
Healthcare, Software products
Technologies
PHP, MySQL, iOS, MongoDB

About Our Client

The Client is a promising US startup founded by a team of experienced mental health professionals.

Challenge

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Client identified a market niche for online, on-demand mental health care.

Drawing on their clinical experience, the Client wanted to launch an Uber-like telemedicine app to connect people experiencing anxiety, depression, or crisis with mental health practitioners. The app was to support patients on their journey to better mental health — helping them track emotions and daily mood, and discover self-help tools and tips vetted by professionals.

The Client opted for a native iOS app and sought an experienced healthcare mobile development team to deliver an MVP within four to six months.

Solution

The Client chose INNERLUXES as its technology partner for the HIPAA-compliant development of the mental health app, based on our iOS and healthcare IT expertise. INNERLUXES assembled a team of a project manager, a lead business analyst, two senior iOS developers, two senior PHP developers, and a senior QA engineer. After carefully analyzing the startup idea and designing the solution, the team worked in four-week iterations and delivered an MVP with the following functionality:

Appointment scheduling

  • Initial patient survey to identify the patient's needs and concerns; based on the results, the app suggests the best-suited mental health specialists.
  • Specialist selection from the suggested list — the patient can review a specialist's photo, title, education, experience, area of competency, location, rate, and patient reviews to find the best fit.
  • Urgent help for unauthenticated users via a "Need to Talk Now" button, which connects the patient to an available specialist who accepts the emergency request.

Patient-therapist communication

  • Online therapy sessions over in-app video calls, immediate or scheduled. After each session, the patient can rate and review the service, and add a therapist to favorites to reach out again.
  • Instant messaging for exchanging text, images, and links.

Mental health self-management (for patients)

  • Mental health journal for logging daily mood and creating private entries.
  • Personalized self-help tools — curated articles and videos surfaced based on the patient's mental health log.
  • Notifications about upcoming therapy sessions.

Payment

  • In-app payment gateway (credit card, Apple Pay) for automated billing according to each specialist's rate.

The team built the app's back end with PHP and used MongoDB and MySQL for databases. Throughout development, INNERLUXES implemented the PHI protection measures required by HIPAA, such as end-to-end PHI encryption and multi-factor user authentication.

Results

The Client received a fully functional MVP of its iOS mental health app within four months. To ease future evolution, INNERLUXES delivered detailed, clear documentation for the MVP. Satisfied with the result, the Client launched the MVP to gather feedback from a focus group of patients and mental health professionals.

Technologies and Tools

PHP, WebRTC, WebSocket, iOS, MongoDB, MySQL.

PHP Case Studies MySQL Case Studies iOS App Case Studies Healthcare IT Case Studies Software Products Case Studies Software Development Case Studies Mobile App Case Studies