Turning years of mental health research into a scalable SaaS product
Our partner
We were approached by Nele Stickens (PhD) who is a researcher, guest professor and managing director of a psychotherapy group practice. For many years, she had been doing research on the impact of feedback instrument throughout psychotherapy treatment trajectories. She approached us to turn her vast clinical and scientific expertise into a digital product tailored to the mental health industry.
The challenge
The mental health sector is underserved with regards to digital treatment instruments. Meanwhile, the Belgian Quality Law requires care providers to store a client records digitally and exchange data securely with other healthcare practitioners through government APIs. We were tasked with building a custom SaaS platform from the ground up to serve all needs in this niche industry.
Our approach
We decided to combine the best of both worlds in one SaaS platform: managing client records and bundling all therapeutic activities in digital treatment pathways with active involvement of patients and their affiliates, with great attention to confidentiality and data privacy.
With support of
Product definition
An ambitious game plan to digitalise mental healthcare
Mental healthcare is a unique niche in the broader healthcare system. In traditional healthcare a doctor determines a diagnosis and then implements a treatment plan. Mental healthcare is more subtle, where the relationship between the care provider and the patient is at the center.
After fully grasping this industry and its subtleties, we formalised a game plan to build a digital offering for psychotherapists and psychiatrists to store their patient records online and build digital treatment pathways.
Design track
We brought all instruments from our playbook to the table to map out the functional requirements through visual prototyping and early user validation.
Architecture track
On the technical front we created a cloud architecture leveraging Google Cloud Platform, keeping security and scalability requirements in mind.
Product development
Shipping an industry-compliant product in only six months
We assisted them in setting up a sprint-based operating model with agile routines. We structured the product development process with clear milestones, bi-weekly planning sessions, well-documented user stories and close involvement of the leadership team.
We brought a combined engineering team together with a clear mandate to build and release quickly while safeguarding product quality through extensive automated tests, monitoring tools, stress tests and other instruments in the deployment pipelines.
Foundations to scale
Giving QIT the foundations to scale
We officially brought QIT online to market in early 2019 and saw rapid growth ever since.
While we're continuously releasing new features, we're helping the QIT team in setting up operational and technical foundations to be ready for an ever-growing user audience: setting up a customer success model, assisting with legal and regulatory aspects, automating billing procedures and monitoring the Google Cloud infrastructure.
The mental health sector is in good hands!
During my search for a reliable product development partner, Panenco truly listened to my story and quickly grasped the mission of QIT. Together we embarked on a rewarding journey in which we combined clinical experience, scientific insights and state-of-the-art cloud engineering.
Nele Stinckens (PhD)
Founder QIT online
In summary
Nele approached us with a truly ambitious plan to innovate in the mental health industry. We didn’t hesitate for a second to start building QIT together, given its strong scientific basis and clear market opportunity.
We turned this into a structural partnership in 2019 and we will gladly keep supporting QIT as it grows up to its full potential!
Let's build!
Are you looking for an entrepreneurial digital partner?
Reach out to hello@panenco.com.
