Mental Health Software Audit and Evolution Planning for an American NGO

Summary

A US mental-health nonprofit was running a software ecosystem — a mobile app, a clinician web app, an admin panel, and an assessment library — that suffered from poor performance, defects, and security concerns, even as the organization wanted to add functionality to streamline assessments and research. INNERLUXES audited the software and planned its evolution in four weeks, delivering UX and code audit reports, a refactoring action plan, and a roadmap — work that led the Client to engage INNERLUXES for the full modernization that followed.

About the Client

The Client is a US-based independent nonprofit organization focused on mental health disorders. With an in-house team of psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and speech therapists, it has released over 2,000 clinical research papers and developed a robust set of mental health educational materials. Beyond scientific and educational materials, it creates evidence-based therapeutic programs for mental health, learning, and behavioral disorders, delivered in its offices, via online video calls, and through dedicated software for mental health assessment and exercises.

Aging Software and Plans to Grow It

The Client was experiencing poor performance, software defects, and security concerns across its mental health software suite, while also considering new functionality to streamline medical assessments and research. To address this, it sought a long-term healthcare IT partner to audit the current software, after which it planned to engage the same vendor to modernize the software, implement new features, and provide ongoing support and maintenance.

A Four-Week Audit Across the Whole Software Ecosystem

INNERLUXES's project team — a project manager, a healthcare IT business analyst, a UX business analyst, and a solution architect — worked in an Agile process split into one-week analysis cycles, each dedicated to one of four key software components:

• A cross-platform mobile app for iOS and Android.
• A web app for clinicians.
• An admin panel.
• A library of exercises and assessments, plus a physician tool for custom assessments, exercises, and research surveys.

Because the software had insufficient documentation, the team interviewed the Client's stakeholders to understand the existing care processes, manually explored the modules, and analyzed the architecture and source code. The audit ran on three tracks:

• UX audit — identifying the main user scenarios for clinicians, admins, and patients and assessing the clarity of navigation and logic, then documenting the problems, a UX refactoring strategy, and updated UX wireframes.
• Code audit — reviewing the architecture and source code for quality, security, maintainability, readability, formatting, performance, and configurability; analyzing QA documentation (testing strategy, test coverage, bug reports); and, for PHI security, examining data protection measures, security controls, and potential code vulnerabilities.
• Software evolution planning — defining the goals for refactoring and evolution, designing a project roadmap, estimating the budget, and planning new features with stakeholders to improve patient assessment workflows, the accuracy of assessment results, and reporting.

A Full Audit and Action Plan in Four Weeks

• Within four weeks, INNERLUXES completed a full audit of the NGO's mental health software ecosystem, documented the issues, and created a software evolution roadmap.
• The software needed full refactoring, including architecture and infrastructure changes and redevelopment of several components from scratch — the clinician web app and the admin panel.
• The Client received a detailed refactoring action plan and comprehensive UI/UX and code audit reports, and went on to engage INNERLUXES for the subsequent software refactoring and evolution project.

Technologies and Tools

React.js, React Native, TypeScript, Python, Firebase, Redis, PostgreSQL, AWS.