The Problem: In today’s stressful times, people need convenient, affordable access to quality mental health care. Sometimes, access to your Therapist of choice is not possible due to insurance plan coverage or network availability.
The Solution: Mental Health Matching (MHM) gives users the freedom to browse and then select an experienced, affordable therapist who specializes in the area of expertise they are looking for help with.
Stressful times have taken a toll on the overall wellness of people. With telehealth’s rising trend, people need a way to access the correct resources for their mental health needs. We want to develop and establish an app, that helps users regain control and choose the therapist they need and trust to give them the appropriate support and guidance.
Our answer is MHM, Mental Health Matching you with your personal therapist. We have been working on this concept where users can view therapist profiles and greeting videos, run free trial sessions with different therapists, and ultimately match them with the best one.
To begin, the proto-persona was created around ideas of who would need and benefit most from MHM. Someone disgruntled, maybe have gone through some drastic life changes recently, and now is thinking about ways to help herself.
Due to Covid-19, toll on mental health welfare has become an increasingly important issue affecting everyone. Therefore, it’s important for users to be able to independently choose mental health professionals that they identify and feel comfortable with. Mental Health Matching (MHM) will allow users to do just that: autonomy to choose and be matched with a therapist in a seamless and easy manner that caters to their specific needs and lifestyle (e.g. Culture, LGBTQ+, trauma informed care, etc).
The team conducted research with 5 1-on-1 interviews among peers, along with a survey filled out by over 20 participants we had sent out around our classmates and social circles. The main research objective was to understand people’s decision making process when seeking proper mental help, and to discover the barriers and pain points that keep them from doing so. The goal was to see how easy/hard it is for users to select an experienced, affordable, therapist who specializes in the area of expertise they are looking for help with.
The following data sets are the criteria users tended to look for and consider when choosing a mental health therapist or provider.
These are some of the prevalent barriers the users faced when receiving mental health services.
We interviewed some peers who’ve had therapy before, along with an interviewee who has not. We mainly wanted to understand how they (would) search for these resources and their experiences with it.
Despite the starting hypothesis, we found that therapist experience and qualifications played a core factor that drove people’s decisions rather than a relevant identity. However, the biggest barriers remain as the lack of insurance coverage and affordability.
So within the research, it seems that there is a big need for people to find convenient and affordable mental health services.
From here, we adjust our app’s aim into creating features that will allow our users to successfully select an experienced, affordable therapist in the specialization that they need. We will also measure our success through the increase in patient/therapist relationship.
For our ideation technique we used the "I Like, I Wish, What if?" method. The “I Like” sections boils down to mostly being able to find an experienced/preferred therapist. The “I Wish” and “What if?” sections are features that revolve around making sure users will have the same quality of care in a virtual session just as in a physical session.
Through brainstorming sessions, we thought these key features were important and something we wanted to develop into our app:
• Therapists will have video greetings in their profile instead of pictures
• Therapy sessions will be offered in various platforms: such as video chat, live chat, phone call
• All new users get 3 free trial sessions where they can test out with 3 different therapists
• Each therapist will have reviews posted on their profile page and users can also leave reviews after their sessions.
Through Amy, here’s a user scenario we wanted to show in order to highlight the features we had set our focus on.
This flow/process will repeat until they choose a primary therapist and/or run out of free trials.
In order to reflect user feedback, we reviewed and reiterated our user task flows. For the prescreening, we added a skip button, bypassing pre-screening and going directly to the “All Therapists” screen.
For the Free Trials flow, we added the option to choose the current therapist as their primary straight away, or save their tab for later.
Using the Design Thinking process, our team demonstrated that the “Mental Health Matching” app gives users control to easily select an experienced, affordable, therapist that specializes in a therapy area they need help with with no initial obligation.
This app demonstrates that separating the Therapist selection process from the constraints of Insurance company policies has the potential to help people find the mental health services they need.
• Build out the other Therapist specialties
• Build out Appointment recall, User Profile, and ability to save multiple specialties
• Add a filtering option
