Introduction

The client’s company specializes in providing psychological counselling made by professional therapists. The company has a small team of full-time employees who deal with administrative, financial, and management tasks and almost two hundred counseling psychologists who work as contractors. Psychologists offer different forms of counselling services for individuals, couples, families, and groups for a large variety of mental health issues and concerns. They also offer online counselling.

The client came to us after an unfortunate attempt to work with freelancers. The platform was not given access to code and documentation from the previous developer, so the Elinext team was hired to rewrite the code from scratch and in accordance with the client’s requirements. The client approached Elinext specifically because Elinext could quickly provide resources for development and had relevant experience in developing healthcare platforms and applications.

Challenge

The company has two main groups of clients. The first group is the clients who are referred by third parties, such as insurance companies. This group doesn’t pay for counselling directly, which means all invoices should go to the company that had referred them to our client. The second group is private clients who pay for counselling themselves.

The client requested the updated booking platform that would, in addition to old features, have the following features:

• Booking appointments with counsellors
• Creating invoices for third parties (e.g., insurance companies)
• Sending receipts to private clients
• Sending invoices to counsellors

This would free the company’s staff from most of the manual work, save them a lot of time, and allow them to concentrate on more complex and creative tasks. The system also would allow for more efficiency in tracking paperwork for billing and communicating with counsellors.

Additionally, it would indicate which of the company’s locations are underutilized by the counsellors. At the moment, some of the counsellors book 100% of the company’s space while using only 30% of the space due to COVID and other reasons.

Solution

Despite that our developers were hired to update the platform as opposed to creating a brand-new one, the platform was made from scratch due to the lack of access to previous code and documentation, as was mentioned before. The following features were built:

• Receipt management
• Invoice management
• Counsellor Pay
• Admin homepage
• Counsellor homepage
• Authorization (login and logout into the system)
• Notifications (system and email notifications)
• Further UI development and increase of the current basic functions
• Login management for counsellors and clients
• Appointment management
• Reminder function for appointments via e-mail and/or SMS

Module 1. Admin homepage

Admin homepage consists of three sections: Dashboard, Bad Fit list, and the list of counsellors. Dashboard contains lists of tasks for the admin. Tasks are generated automatically and can get marked as Completed.

Bad Fit list is a list of clients who were considered as not a good fit for the company’s services. The list is also generated automatically based on some negative actions a client has committed, for example, canceling a session two times in a row or not showing up for a session without canceling it in advance. The Bad Fit list has a space for a client’s name, their counsellor’s name and a space for the administrator to make notes. For example, the admin could call up a person who was automatically added to the Bad Fit list and clear the situation up. Later, the client could be removed from this list.

Counsellors’ tab has a list of counsellors. Every counsellor has a list of direct and indirect and active/deactivated clients. For every client there is a payment source, a number of approved sessions (i.e. approved by the insurance company or another payment source), used sessions, billed sessions, and an expiry date. Consultants are warned in advance automatically if the number of the client’s approved sessions is ending and if they need to submit paperwork to the payment source company to prolong the number of sessions for the client.

The state of the client is color-coded. For example, if the number of approved sessions is coming to an end, they are highlighted in red. If the counsellor has submitted the paperwork for more sessions and can continue working with the client, they are highlighted in pink. For self-paid clients, they are highlighted in red if they haven’t paid for more than one session.

Module 2. Invoice management

Invoice management has two prominent features: Appointments Search and Direct Billing/ Receipts Management.

Appointment search allows the admin to see a list of clients’ appointments, search for a specific client, or filter by date/name.

Invoice management is a section where invoices are generated for third parties or emailed to self-paid clients. Invoices can be previewed, edited, and exported within one category or individually as a PDF or an Excel file.

Module 3. Counsellor pay

This section deals with the invoices for counsellors. Invoices are generated by the admin and emailed to counsellors at the default date each month. The texts for emails are generated automatically and are editable. The price for a session and service fee are tailored to every counsellor. The administrator can preview the invoice and export the invoice to PDF. Unpaid sessions are saved for the next invoice as outstanding items.

Module 4. Counselor homepage

This module allows counsellors to see all of their clients, both activated and deactivated. This module also contains alerts to signal counsellors to take action to prepare documents for extending clients’ approvals for sessions. The feature allows tracking clients’ approvals and payments and requesting deactivating/activating a client.

Module 5. Receipt management

Receipt management allows counsellors to send a receipt to their client if for some reason it had not been sent by the administrator. There is a search field where counsellor can find their clients, see all their appointments, choose the necessary appointments, and manually generate a receipt for these appointments specifically. The receipt can be edited and emailed to the client.

Result

The Elinext team built a platform with multiple new features and complicated logic. As a result, we managed to:

• Reduce the time counsellors spend sending receipts to clients by at least 2 min per receipt.
• Improve the Direct bill tracking for overdue paperwork with 100% traceability and non-direct bill charging for late or non-payments.
• Reduce the manual work engagement for up to 15 man-days of full engagement per month.

At Elinext, we create multiple healthcare platforms, all unique in their specific features but equal in their high quality and usability. You can see more examples here. Please feel free to contact our team if you have any ideas or requests.