The New Age of Mental Health Care:
A rise in mental health apps for doctors, mental health apps for patients, and mental health apps for kids have efficiently demolished the treatment barriers for mental health problems. Whether it is geographic limitations or financial hurdles, apps for mental health can address these challenges. Another barrier towards treatment for mental health conditions is the stigma that comes with it. Through intelligent mental health applications, patients can receive treatment anonymously and with complete confidentiality. Value-driven behavioral health services offer access to various professional practitioners with secure 24/7 hotline support for critical cases.
At OSP, a Texas-based mental health center wanted to automate the practice management process to minimize revenue loss through quick access to mental health, automated appointment scheduling, and secure online payments. The goal was to ensure the digitization of the clinic’s daily practice and revenue operations. Through an agile approach to healthcare app development, OSP was able to provide:
- A Telepsych feature where patients can get in touch with their providers from the comforts of their home via teleconferencing
- An automated appointment scheduling platform for the patients to schedule appointments with their respective providers.
- SOAP Notes feature for providers to store their patient notes in a digital platform that could be easily retrieved.
- Patients make easy online payments, reducing the effort to send invoices manually.
Types of Mental Health Apps
1. Suicide Prevention Apps:
These behavioral health apps are designed to offer treatments through intelligent healthcare management solutions . These apps to help with mental health allow several layers of customizations. Patients who are suicidal can enter their own warning signs, coping strategies, and offer emergency connections through custom mhealth app development. Patient engagement systems can be deployed to offer consistent help on dealing with suicidal thoughts.
2. General Mental Health Apps:
Mental health has gained unprecedented importance with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. These mental health apps for doctors and mental health apps for kids provide accessible ways to manage unhealthy thoughts and effective strategies to relieve stress through behavioral health solutions. Through medical records management solutions, doctors and patients can access medical records during video therapy consults. Mental health applications can also provide social connections for people looking to cope by connecting with individuals in the same mental health space. These apps are often called mental health support apps.
3. Addiction Apps:
Addiction is a surging disease worldwide, and behavioral health software solutions towards addressing this ailment are the need of the hour. Mental health apps solutions can deploy integrated healthcare solutions to offer holistic care for addiction. Even though they might not be a replacement for in-person help, mental health app software solutions can provide instant support, track sobriety, and monitor triggers. Through intelligent features, these apps can assist individuals in recovery to remain addiction-free.
4. Anxiety Apps:
Over 40 million adults in the U.S. suffer from one or the other form of anxiety. Anxiety can be transformed into a largely manageable condition through mental health app development and population health management solutions. Mental health application development allows patients to focus on critical breathing exercises through reminders and other tools. Self-help techniques are made accessible, and the social connections feature can provide considerable relief. Healthcare providers can integrate the electronic health records of patients to offer documentation assistance.
5. Disorder Apps:
This form of health care app development addresses bipolar disorder, eating disorders, OCDs, etc. Through healthcare mobile app development, assistive tools for mood tracking, trigger identification are offered. Stress levels can be documented through summary charts, and healthcare interoperability can be applied to connect with professionals. Medical app development is applied to track symptoms, elevate moods, diagnose meal plans, maintain progress charts, set goals, receive support and guidance, provide analysis, increase awareness, and track medications through healthcare automation.
6. Depression Apps:
Among the most common mental health condition, depression can be a lingering trauma that affects every aspect of an individual’s life. Medical app development for depression can aid with mood-boosting technology and provide virtual counseling. Healthcare providers can be made available for connection through text messages or video consults. Furthermore, through healthcare application development, mood training programs can be offered to overcome negative thoughts. Finally, health app development provides guided meditations, breathing exercises.
Top Developmental Features of Mental Health Apps
1. Self-Monitoring:
This is a critical feature of healthcare app development as it empowers the user to take control of their mental health. Self-monitoring techniques allow the patients to track their symptoms before they progress and engage in preventive healthcare, which is essential to mental healthcare. This feature can go a long way in providing stress-management strategies that can positively influence their mental health. Health product managers must incorporate self-monitoring features within medical mobile app development for better management of overall mental health.
2. Notifications and Reminders:
Another essential feature of a mobile behavioral health system is that notifications and reminders offer users customized suggestions regarding their mental health. With the notifications and reminders feature, mental health apps for doctors can aid professionals and patients through regular management of their mental health condition. Users get reminders as a useful technique within their daily lives. However, mental health applications should not be undertaken with an overabundance of this feature as it can tend do have the opposite effect if a patient receives too many reminders or alerts.
3. Sharing:
Sharing is an integral feature of mental health services as it allows patients to connect with their support group, SOS contacts, and healthcare professionals. Sharing their current state, progress, moods, and therapy achievements is in tandem with mental health recovery. Electronic data exchange solutions can be a useful addition to the behavioral health app to achieve this goal effectively. Multiple avenues of information extraction into different formats can aid users in sharing information more easily.
4. Support Groups:
This is a core component of behavioral health and needs to be incorporated into behavioral health solutions. Over 80% of patients with a mental health condition find support groups helpful towards recovery. Sharing information with a safe and confidential set of people allows users to feel safe and hopeful. Through open online forums for discussion and supervision by a mental health professional, users are likely to engage in a series of discussions. However, mental health apps for doctors should ensure to the deployment of HIPAA-compliant solutions to ensure confidentiality of patient health data.
5. Dashboards:
Therapy dashboards are ideal platforms for mental health professionals to stay in touch with their patients and access patient information via health care app development. These dashboards can be designed in the form of web apps that allow professionals to receive, send and modify patient information for the perusal of both parties through cloud computing in healthcare. Customization can be undertaken based on the needs of the mental health professional, which aids the optimal functioning of mental health services. Therapists can view this information before a session to learn more about their patient’s progress.
6. Connections:
Providing a range of ways to connect with therapists and support groups safely is essential to the success of healthcare application development. The developer must look to provide video, audio, text, and other forms of connections between the mental health professionals and patients. Health app development should be designed so that the main interaction between the therapist and patient takes place on the app itself.
Conclusion
Medical mobile app development has shown great promise toward providing effective mental health services with solutions designed to address various mental health problems. However, gaining a keen understanding of the user needs through medical informatics, and the consistent deployment of critical features is essential to high usability.
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About Author
Written by Riken Shah linkedin
Riken's work motto is to help healthcare providers use technological advancements to make healthcare easily accessible to all stakeholders, from providers to patients. Under his leadership and guidance, OSP Labs has successfully developed over 600 customized software solutions for 200+ healthcare clients across continents.