A lot of wellness apps out there seem to be missing one very important ingredient: doctors.
When you’re dealing with something as critical as health, it’s not enough to create an app that offers a temporary fix, or leaves users browsing aimlessly for medical answers. There needs to be a clinical professional to monitor progress, especially for people with serious medical illnesses.
Danny Freed, founder & CEO of Blueprint (John Rosin/Technori)
That’s where Blueprint comes in.
Danny Freed created Blueprint, a behavioral health app, so that professional clinicians can track patient’s progress between visits.
“What we do is collect a bunch of different data points and measurements between each appointment,” says Danny. “We take all that data, share it back with the clinician at the follow-up visit, and they can use that to make smarter treatment decisions.”
Blueprint isn’t a wellness app that sends push notifications of Ghandi quotes. Instead it collects data points on everything from sleep to fitness to mood shifts throughout the day. With 100,000 daily users, their goal is to become a natural extension of the clinical professional’s workflow.
Pivoting from its ‘joyful’ beginnings
Today, Blueprint serves as a touchpoint between patients and doctors. But back in its earlier days, the app was called HelloJoy. As the name might suggest, its approach wasn’t nearly as clinical as it is now.
“HelloJoy was just the patient side of things,” says Danny. “It was just consumers, self monitoring, self assessments.”
HelloJoy would send questionnaires out to its users, collecting valuable data along the way. “We would have this daily conversation with you, ask you a bunch of questions, collect a bunch of information,” which was then synthesized into a report.
Within a year, Danny noticed that the report was always the highest point of engagement for Hello Joy’s most frequent users; it functioned as a valuable resource to share progress with mental health professionals.
“We realized there’s something here. There’s value for the patient and there’s value for the clinician.”
Rebranding mindfully
Pivoting from a wellness content platform to a trusted medical resource isn’t easy, especially for a young company trying to raise capital. As Blueprint transitioned towards a more clinical mission, they needed a more medical name to match.
“I think when push came to shove, we really sat down and thought about what we wanted to represent,” says Danny. “What emotions we wanted to invoke with our name.”
So Danny consulted one of his two primary audiences: the clinicians.
“How were they going to respond to the name? And how are their patients going to respond when they said: ‘Hey, you should start using Blueprint. I’m gonna enroll you on that platform.’”
A ‘blueprint’ for medical assessment
“Everything we do is based on this methodology called measurement based care,” says Danny.
As a blueprint — literally — for a patient’s medical journey, he explains that the app offers three different HIPAA compliant tests for its users:
- Standardized assessments: Blueprint hosts traditional, clinical assessments for a host of disorders that clinicians can analyze. “What we do is we automate the delivery, automate the scoring, automate the documentation,” says Danny.
- Daily check-ins: Danny says that the daily check-ins involve a 30-second interactive questionnaire meant to capture a patient’s mood throughout the day.
- Background information: When a patient signs up for Blueprint, they grant the app access to information like their location and health kit. “We can pull out of that from those data streams — exercise, sleep, behavioral signals,” Danny says. “For example, knowing how much you’re sleeping over time can be an indicator — and also a huge lever — to pull as a clinician.”
Coexisting with clinicians’ workflow
In order to continue growing, Danny aims to fit Blueprint within a clinician’s natural workflow “without it being an extra burden,” he says. “It helps them be better at their job.”
Danny explains that working closely with clinicians will help expand usership among patients: “One of the things we say is we want to drive patient adoption through clinician adoption.”
Looking forward, Danny says the goal is for their clinicians to get 100 percent of patients using Blueprint’s platform.
“Right now we’re really laser focused on how to ingrain this into their day-to-day so that this is something that is built into their workflow,” he says. “As we start to find that, then we’ll start to sort of pour gasoline on the fire and expand to as many clinicians.”
