An Ottawa entrepreneur is putting nearly two decades of mental health experience into a mobile application with the goal of making treatment more accessible.
Snapclarity, launched by Terrace Wellness founder Terri Storey, raised $1.5 million late last year and is coming soon to both Apple and Android devices.
Storey recently joined Techopia Live to talk about how running a clinic exposed her to the numerous shortcomings in our collective approach to mental wellness. For example, patients were waiting up to 18 months to receive services, they couldn’t easily share their medical histories with new care providers and when they did finally receive treatment, it wasn’t tailored to their specific needs.
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“We saw lots of barriers to care,” she told Techopia Live.
Snapclarity hopes to remove those barriers with a mobile app. After signing up, users take a 15-minute mental health assessment and are immediately given a game plan for better wellness and are connected to an accredited therapist. For $150 each month, patients have unlimited text messages with their care provider and access to video chat sessions.
Storey says the on-demand mobile approach is a strong alternative to regular therapy sessions, which often come at the wrong time to be of use to someone in crisis.
Snapclarity is also targeting the enterprise space, as Storey believes that standard benefits packages do not cater to today’s employee needs. The pitch is a common one: the happier your workforce is, the more productive they’ll be.
“Insurance is ready to be disrupted. They need to start offering us plans that make sense,” Storey said.
Getting Snapclarity off the ground has been a multi-year project for the entrepreneur, who was previously named Ottawa Businesswoman of the Year by the Women’s Business Network.
While building out the idea, Storey says she had to learn how to be the CEO of a tech company. Communicating her design to a team of developers was new to her, for example, and she found her original visions for the application changed often based on client feedback.
“It’s not always about my vision. At the beginning, definitely it was, but you pivot,” she told Techopia Live.
“What you learn and what people want is very different from what your intuition could be. So we keep our ears very close to what the user experience should be about.”
