SiebentagIT

Case study

MindSpot

From the pitch to production: rebuilt the world’s largest online mental health clinic, then moved it to AWS and cut running costs by 70%.

Client

MindSpot Clinic

Industry

Mental health

When

2016 — 2020

Services

  • Product leadership
  • UX research and redesign
  • Web application development
  • AWS migration

Technical listing

  • Vue.js
  • Node.js
  • React
  • Ruby on Rails
  • PostgreSQL
  • Docker
  • Terraform
  • AWS
  • Jest

Challenge

MindSpot’s therapists and administrators were supporting more than 100,000 Australians through anxiety, depression, stress and chronic pain — on a platform that had grown past the point of being kind to its users or its operators.

A patient self-assessment and learning product had already gone over time and over budget with an incumbent vendor. Content for courses lived outside a proper CMS. The estate still ran on permanent servers in a data centre.

The brief was not a facelift. It was to evaluate, redesign and replace the therapist platform, finish the patient product, and get off the metal — with a longer-term option to license the clinic software as a platform.

Solution

Led the work from first pitch through production. User research with therapists drove a new information architecture, then a rebuild that broke a Rails monolith into APIs with separate SPAs for patients, therapists and clinic managers.

The therapist platform shipped in May 2020: allocation of incoming assessments, referral and telephone screening, treatment notes, questionnaires, a working calendar, and reporting on load and clinical progress.

On the patient side: a self-assessment and guided-course LMS, plus a CMS so therapists could actually author lessons. On the infrastructure side: GoCD pipelines, RDS, disaster recovery, and ephemeral AWS infrastructure with single-click, no-downtime deploys.

Outcome

The therapist platform replaced the in-house clinic system for patient status, courses, reporting and progress monitoring.

AWS migration cut MindSpot’s infrastructure cost by 70% and left the client team able to operate it.

The clinic kept doing the thing that mattered: connecting psychologists to people who needed them, without the software getting in the way.

A big thank you to the team who have worked hard with Ben and our team to make this happen. Their commitment, professionalism, and support has been greatly appreciated.
— Nick Titov, CEO of MindSpot
The website in general is simple and easy to navigate through as a patient and I like the animation/motion with each click.
— Therapist, MindSpot