Mindbloom
Mental health and wellbeing with Psychedelic medicine
Postindustria architected and built the mobile-ready MVP web application for growth to handle the telehealth processes and treatments via the Portal that the clients access remotely. The rapid start of development by getting up to speed reactively with business processes of a company with an existing customer base, discovering the considerable scope has resulted in hitting OKR goals and targeting the launch dates lowered by the business.
It’s always better to see how it works with your own eyes than to read about it, right?
Who the Client is_
Mindbloom is a revolutionary mental health company with the mission to help others expand their human potential. It increases access to effective treatments for anxiety and depression, starting with guided ketamine therapy.
With COVID-19 reaching crisis level, the pandemic accelerated the inevitable future of remote healthcare and remote work even faster. Launched in NY, the company has expanded nationwide and operated fully remotely.
Please find the full downloadable version of how we achieved clients’ challenges here.
Client Challenges_
The company launched in 2018 bringing it’s science-backed medicine into the wellbeing vertical. Using personalized treatment programs the company evolved its practice based on client feedback to improve experiences and outcomes. Clients were guided and nurtured through the program by the operations team directly. This approach hindered the companies ability to expand and improve clients’ outcomes.
Mindbloom was looking for a technological partner who could help them retain their momentum and produce a digital HIPAA compliant product in a short amount of time. The operational processes of the treatment layer had to be left unaffected and clients’ transition to the digital product had to be smooth and unstressful.
Our Solution_
HIPAA Compliance
Management and accessibility to ePHI (electronic protected health information) is strictly regulated with numerous requirements by the HIPAA act in the US. The violation of the act (fully or partially, including the exposing of private information) carries hefty fines. The OCR (who is delegated by the HIPAA enforcement) processes more than 10k complaints yearly.
Mindbloom’s main idea of behaving in alignment with their core values of putting the clients first and practice intellectual honesty had to be handled by following the US regulations in the core of the business.
There were a number of measures that were put in place to ensure Mindbloom remained HIPPA compliant:
- Architected the application to store a slight minimum of ePHI at Mindbloom DB; the rest of the information is linked and stored at HIPAA compliant services and applications
- No access to the production information (DB, Back office, any other scripts that allow to access the information on the production and expose) by anyone in the team unless they have a separate personal account in a corresponding service
- Complete logging, storing and back-up of all requests to ePHI related information including the service information (of when who and under which circumstances accessed the ePHI)
- BAA with Postindustria company
- No ePHI related data mention in any of the channels of communications between the team members (nor visually, textually etc.); using internal ID and UDIDs
MVP of the digital product — Sherpa
Mindbloom had an operational business and processes well defined and set. But the set of all treatments, guides, processes and nurturing was fragmented. The company had to pack all of that into a digital product. Sherpa is the web app aka Client portal for Mindbloom’s clients to receive treatment and complete their guided therapy.
Can this be done quickly and help maintain momentum – was the driving force behind every decision that was considered and approved. The company was looking for Postindustria to build an MVP that could improve, expand and grow with fast-moving changes of Mindbloom business.
Every single piece of functionality for the treatment-related process was reduced by using the 3rd party tools to speed up the delivery and remain HIPAA compliant.
- Pusher.com to support front-end notifications and keep the user experience real-time
- ViralLoops — marketing refer a friend campaigns
- Acuity — the time slots, calls, and appointment booking provider
- JotForms to implement surveys and support complicated multi-conditional forms
In total, using the 3rd party HIPAA compliant integrations and techniques saved Mindbloom about 43% of cash, reducing the development effort down to the very minimum.
MVP of a guiding through the treatment — Staff portal
The business expansion could have crumbled by having to serve all the processes around each of the clients 100% individually. Mindbloom was looking for process automation and flexibility to adapt to the needs in a defined list of use-cases by advanced customization of the experience (user journey). The staff portal is the back-office with access-based roles for the operational team and operators to manage clients and processes in Mindbloom.
In addition to a general functionality that allows managing users, Postindustria fulfilled the full list of operations for OPS to manage and customize the treatment programs in Mindbloom. The treatment program is a multi-step guided process with dozens of conditions, variables and time-based automations.
The customization required to build the constructor required heavy-logic functionality that could apply changes and modify the steps to all users in the system regardless of their progress in the treatment.
Process_
Postindustria engineering teams are agile: from the software engineers to the project manager. With an average 8+ years of management experience, our TPMs ensure projects run smoothly, effectively and adapt to the needs of a particular industry/business.
The manager and CEO of Mindbloom chose SCRUM as the most obvious approach. Using a SCRUM framework we could deliver valuable increments of the product to the clients, be ready to handle drastic changes to the scope, and to produce results in the expected timeframes and manage deadlines effectively.
Mindbloom followed the OKR system in the processes management and deliverability, so Postindustria seamlessly integrated the engineering SCRUM into that without affecting the HQ.
The scheduled communications and touch-points with HQ were consolidated session completed in under an hour.:
- Weekly OKR check-ins
- Bi-weekly Product planning meeting
- UI/UX and Front-end design sync with CEO and Product designer
Product requirement clarification meet-ups were running periodically to ensure stories were kept up to date in the backlog. The project manager also acted as the product owner bridging the gap between development and stakeholders.
The engineering team delivered the valuable pieces of the Sherpa and Staff portal bi-weekly. Preceding with the regression testing the whole release process took less than 5 hrs in a total. The essential parts of any of the releases were:
- Unit tests — to detect and prevent changes that may beak the app
- Product documentation — the guides for OPS-team members to have instructions on “how to use”
- Product demo — screencasts of the delivered functionality to demo what the engineering team built
- Technical documentation — a set of diagrams and requirements covering the back-end part of the system
The efficiency facts:
- The engineering team had a 50% workday overlap with Mindbloom’s operational team and stakeholders
- Response time (turnover) for requests and questions non-working hours to business hours is less than 10 hrs
- No blocker issues on the production leading to outages or blocking the core functionality of clients and businesses
Results_
Postindustria’s engineering team built a product for Mindbloom that exactly fit the expectations of stakeholders. The engineering team integrated into the culture of Mindbloom, at the same time never being unrealistic in terms of added processes for the HQ team. We packed the processes into a product without disturbing the business from their goals: expand human potential.
