Case Studies
Anxiety Online
Anxiety Online is an internet-based treatment clinic for people with anxiety problems. It is a world-first initiative of the National eTherapy Centre (NeTC) at Swinburne University of Technology and funded by the Federal Department of Health and Ageing.
Requirements
The National eTherapy Centre invited SDH Consulting Group to develop their online solution for the delivery of treatment programs for people with anxiety problems. They required:
- a sophisticated and fool-proof online assessment testing for symptoms of over 30 pyschological disorders, incorporating complex branching, scoring and tagging logic;
- user-specific reports showing the outcome of their assessment including summary of symptoms, results and recommendations;
- SPSS friendly data collection and export
- an intuitive and robust content management system for delivering free public content and structuring 5 different treatment programs plus two training programs
- an online message centre for managing communication between program participants, eTherapists, supervisors and program managers;
- rich program content including videos, audio, FLASH movies and interactive tools;
- tools for managing client registrations and the relationship between clients, eTherapists and their supervisors
- payment gateway integration for the therapist-assisted program streams;
- interface design, training and documentation;
- secure, scalable hosting, service monitoring and backup of all aspects of the website including program content, communications and research data;
The solution
Once the parameters of the project were identified through a software requirements specification (SRS) we began deploying the foundations of Anxiety Online using WebGUI’s excellent, Perl-based, open-source content management system. WebGUI ticks a lot of requirements boxes from the get-go with its intuitive interface, user and group authentication, permission system and a suite of robust content management tools. WebGUI was chosen for its scalability, extensibility and flexibility. Layered on top of WebGUI was Abachi, our proprietary research engine. In addition to providing sophisticated data collection and analysis tools for the researchers, Abachi integrated the interactive components of the site into a single cohesive user experience, providing a seamless path from initial account creation, assessment data gathering and user-tailored program recommendations, payment gateway processing, program enrolment and time-controlled access, and follow-up assessments. Crucially, Abachi also handles the collection and export of data in native SPSS format.
The configuration of user groups allowed us to assign role-based permissions to different areas of the site. Content managers and program writers were given permissions to add/edit/delete content only in their designated areas. A separate researchers group were granted permissions to download native SPSS data from the main survey objects on the site. A manager’s group was given access to a specific area of the site for assigning eTherapists to clients and communicating with all major user groups.
Working with ProcoliX, world leaders in WebGUI site hosting, we developed a specialised server cluster configuration that would handle the load, fail-over, redundancy and backup requirements for a site expected to grow to a user base of over 10,000 users within the first few years. This cluster was deployed on servers in a world-class data centre in Australia and set-up with a battery of automated monitors to ensure maximum uptime and lightening fast incident response.
Large video and audio files were set-up on Amazon cloud servers to minimise bandwidth costs and integrated into the content management system for easy deployment by program writers.
Database encryption and best practice, industry-standard web security protocols were employed to ensure all sensitive client data was secure.
All custom code was developed with an impressive array of unit tests to ensure maximum reliability. This extended to a specific test suite for the online psychological assessment to ensure the diagnosis a client received was completely reliable.
SDH Consulting Group was proud to handle all stages of the development of Anxiety Online from interface design, to software development, training, documentation, payment gateway integration, bullet-proof secure hosting and maintenance.