A Mental Health Telehealth Platform Taken From Concept To Organisation-Scale SaaS.

PurpleCloud is an electronic health record and practice platform for mental health clinicians. Scheduling, therapy notes, billable hours, billing and insurance, and video sessions all sit in one system, and the practice can run fully virtual, in-office, or a mix of the two.

When the founders approached us in April 2021 there was no software at all. What existed was a description of how mental health practices actually operate and where the tools available to them fell short. We built the first complete platform from that, and it was live within six months.

In March 2023 they returned with a different problem. The same clinical model, but sold to hospitals and larger organisations rather than to individual practitioners — which is a different product, not a bigger version of the first one. That second programme is the larger part of this engagement, and our founder took the CTO role for it.

We had not built clinical software before. That is the honest constraint on this project and it is what shaped the sequencing of the first six months.

Mental health practice carries rules that are not visible from outside it. A therapy note is simultaneously a clinical record, a billing record, and a document with legal weight. Session hours feed payroll and insurance claims rather than just a timesheet. Scheduling sits inside obligations that a general-purpose calendar knows nothing about. Getting any of that wrong is not a cosmetic defect in a healthcare setting — it is a practitioner unable to bill for work they have done, or a record that does not hold up when it is examined.

The second engagement carried a different risk entirely. A platform that serves one practice well does not become a platform that serves many organisations by adding a column to a table. Where a single practice has one set of rules, an organisation has a hierarchy of them, and the assumptions that made the first build simple are the ones that have to be unpicked first.

Because the domain was new to us, we took it from the people who worked in it rather than inferring it from a competitor's feature list. Clinicians described how a session actually becomes a note, how a note becomes a billable hour, and how that hour becomes a claim. The model came out of those conversations before any of it was built.

The first engagement was deliberately not phased into a pilot. A partial practice platform is not usable — a clinician cannot run half their caseload on it — so the target was a complete system that a practice could move onto, and it was scoped tightly enough to reach that inside six months.

The SaaS programme was run differently again. Taking the CTO role meant owning the technical direction and the team building it, rather than delivering against a specification someone else maintained.

The practice platform covers the working day end to end. Appointments with custom reminders and calendar synchronisation against iCal, Google, or Outlook. A therapy note system that tracks billable hours and archives client history. Paperless intake forms and client profile management. Billable hour tracking with export for payroll. Billing with automated insurance verification and claims. Telehealth through video conferencing, with sessions running over Google Meet, Zoom, or Teams.

The integration work is a larger part of that list than it looks. A clinician's calendar, their video tool, and their insurer all sit outside the platform, and the platform is only useful to the extent that it removes the manual step between them rather than adding another place to check.

The second programme rebuilt that clinical model as a SaaS product aimed at hospitals and larger organisations, taken from concept through to a delivered product and then handed to the client.