There are so many mental health apps and software tools, it can be a bit daunting to find the right ones. In no particular order, the list below includes tools and apps recommended by professionals within the mental health industry.

Software Tools & Apps for Mental Health

Virtual Hope Box: National Center for Telehealth & Technology

Developed by the National Center for Telehealth & Technology, the Virtual Hope Box (VHB) is a smartphone application designed for use by patients and their behavioral health providers as an accessory to treatment. VHB contains simple tools to help patients with coping, relaxation, distraction and positive thinking.

Both patients and providers can work together to personalize the VHB content on the patient’s smartphone according to their specific needs. Then, the app can be used away from the clinic, continuing to add or change content as needed.

Mood Tracker: Online Tools for Depression and Bipolar Disorder

Online Mood Tracker helps bipolar and depression patients manage medications using graphical mood charts, a mood journal and text-message reminders to take medications and enables caregiver  information sharing.

PatientsLikeMe

The worlds largest personalized health network that helps people find new treatments, connect with others and take action to improve their outcomes. This digital health learning system uses the most advanced technologies to help patients better understand wellness, aging, and disease.

Calm App

A paid app (it does offer a free trial) for meditation techniques, sleep and stress reduction.  This app has been downloaded over 26 million times and has over 225,000 5-star reviews — it’s the #1 app for mindfulness and wellness according to its website. The Calm App has been named Apple’s App of the Year and Editors Choice by Google Play.

Moment App

This iOS app automatically tracks how much you use your iPhone and iPad each day. If you determine that those devices are being used too much, daily limits can be set along with notifications to alert you when you’ve gone over your limit.

Moment Family will allow you to manage your family’s screen time from your own phone and set up time for your entire family to be screen free using family dinner time. You can enforce limits when someone, including you. is using their device too much.

SelfControl 

A free Mac application and open-source application that lets you block access to distracting websites, your mail servers, or anything else on the internet. Users can set a specific amount of time to block for and can add specific sites to their blacklist — until that timer expires, they will be unable to access those sites even if your computer is restarted or the application is deleted.

Health Storylines

Designed for the patient, Health Storylines safely stores and tracks information about your medications, symptoms, mood, weight, blood pressure and more. Patients can then share a summary of their health with their doctor.

Mindfulness Coach: National Center for PTSD

The Mindfulness Coach mobile app will help you practice mindfulness meditation. What is mindfulness? It’s grounding yourself in the present moment and it’s been shown to be helpful for reducing stress and coping with unpleasant thoughts and emotions. Features include:

• Education about the benefits of mindfullness
• Mindfulness exercises to practice on your own or with guidance
• Strategies to help overcome challenges to mindfulness practice
• Log of mindfulness exercises to track your progress
• Reminders to encourage continued practice

PFA Mobile (Psychological First Aid)

Designed to assist responders who provide psychological first aid (PFA) to adults, families and children as part of an organized response effort.

PTSD Coach

A mobile app to help you learn about and manage symptoms that can occur after trauma. PTSD coach has been dowloaded over 100,000 times in 74 countries around the world. Features include:

• Reliable information on PTSD and treatments that work
• Tools for screening and tracking your symptoms
• Convenient, easy-to-use tools to help you handle stress symptoms
• Direct links to support and help
• Always available to you

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We’d love to keep adding to this list, so if you have additional apps that you use and recommend, please email editor@behavioralhealth360.com with the blog post title “Software Tools and Apps Recommended By Mental Health Advocates” as your subject line.

Would you like your mental or behavioral health app to be featured on the BH360º Podcast? Then send an email to podcast@behavioralhealth360.com.

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What Is A Patient Persona & How Can It Help Me Increase Patient Acquisition?

A patient persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal patient type based upon real data about existing similar patients. Information frequently included within a patient persona includes behavior patterns, motivations, goals and demographics. The strongest personas typically include market data as well.

The Purpose of Patient Personas

Developing patient personas will help you understand your prospective customers better and it will actually make creating content for your website, blog, and social media pages even easier. Why? Because once you’ve identified your top personas, you’ll be creating content that speaks directly to that patient persona — not about yourself, your practice or you program.

2 Content Marketing Mistakes To Avoid

A few common content mistakes that people make are whether this is on their website pages, blog content or in videos are:

1.) Writing Content About Yourself or Your Services

There is a time and place for this content, and it’s limited to your About Us page — with that being said, you can always take information about you and translate that into how your skills/qualifications/practice/program helps your target patient personas.

If you catch yourself writing about yourself or your service, stop and see how you can reframe that into how it helps your ideal patient persona instead.

2.) Not Using Multiple Forms of Content

Images today are simply not enough, and further to that point, if you’re using stock photos on your website you should take some time to invest in photographs of your facility instead. Why? Because it is much more personal and will give prospective patients a sense of what your facility is like and who the people are that work there — it’s well worth the investment. Infographics can be helpful as well. Free softwares like Canva.com can make creating infographics and adding personalization to your photos simple and beautiful.

Back to multiple forms of content, video is increasingly becoming more important and will absolutely differentiate you from the practice or program down the street that’s not using it. If pictures are worth 1000 words… videos are worth… a lot more! If you can create your own videos, that’s fantastic and preferred. If not, perhaps there are videos you can embed from YouTube.

Developing Patient Personas

Think about who your ideal clients are and pick your top three. Then come up with some creative names for them such as Bipolar Becky or Alcoholic Adam. Next, write some bullets about your target patient persona is in terms of who they are, what their goals are, why they need help and how you can help them. This can be as simple as creating a bulleted list.

If you want to get more detailed, here are 20 Questions To Ask When Creating Buyer Personas from HubSpot. Note: The HubSpot term for personas is “Buyer Persona” and another term often used is “Avatar” — regardless of the terminology used, the purpose and process is similar. HubSpot also has templates that can be dowloaded to help with this process. Just keep in mind they’re targeting business people and they’re not in the healthcare space, so these questions won’t be completely on target with your needs.

Applying Patient Personas To Content Marketing

Now that you have a sense of who your ideal patients are, you can begin to create content specifically for them on your website, blog, and/or social media posts.

If your specialty is treating female patients with Bipolar Disorder, then you’ll want to create content specific to that Patient Persona — Bipolar Becky and Alcoholic Adam.

With what you know about Becky and Adam, you can now begin creating content that speaks directly to that patient persona. Here are some topic ideas:

• What Is Bipolar Disorder?
• 3 Misunderstandings About Bipolar Disorder
• 10 Warning Signs You May Be an Alcoholic
• So, I’m An Alcoholic — Now What?

With patient personas in mind, review the information and blog content that’s already on your website and determine if it is speaking in general terms or to your top personas. Adjust as needed.

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In 2018, Samantha Drazin Sultan, LMHC, launched her new business venture in Florida — KhoSpace — a beautiful, flexible, on-demand coworking space for mental health professionals. After several locations were originally launched in the United Kingdom, KhoSpace now has a beautiful location in Aventura, Florida, directly in between Fort Lauderdale and Miami Beach.

While looking to start a private practice of her own, Samantha brought her idea to life out of necessity as she struggled to find affordable office space in safe locations. Now a licensed clinician herself, interns at KhoSpace are able to work beneath her, which was another challenge she experienced when starting out.

Coworking Office Space for Therapists

KhoSpace is an ideal work environment for newly qualified mental health professionals that are looking to grow roots in an upscale work environment. This is also an ideal option for more established professionals that are looking to transition out of a big practice, expand practice locations, or for those who recently relocated and are looking to find their new home.

This upscale, welcoming office space offers therapists social opportunities for:

• Partnering with businesses that benefit your professional success
• Internal referral network
• Peer consultations
• Special events
• Social networking hours
• Speaker series

Beautiful, Flexible, and On-demand Luxury Office Settings

KhoSpace’s on-demand hourly office rentals offers you a luxury office setting and includes:

• Private sound proof spaces
• Easy to use online booking system
• Unlimited printing, copying, and faxing
• High-speed Wifi
• Complementary coffee bar
• Cleaning services
• Security guarded gated entrance to property
• Use of address for members and mail handling
• Panic buttons in each space
• Waiting room for patients

Learn More About KhoSpace

Samantha was recently featured on The Private Practice Startup (episode 87 ) Podcast where she discussed how she got started, the challenges she faced starting out in the mental health field, and where she would like to take KhoSpace within the next 3 to 5 years. Hint — she’s looking to expand across the United States.

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