Sanvello is the largest mobile mental health platform providing full-stack, comprehensive support — self-care, coaching, therapy, and community — to help millions of people around the world feel better.
Tech Stack: Java/Dropwizard on the back-end, AngularJS/migrating to React on the front-end, AWS, Postgresql, Redis
Please contact Dale Beermann, CTO, at dale [dot] beermann [at] sanvello [dot] com
I'm still early in my thinking around this, but welcome the discussion. From my early research and discussions, there is a solution that is needed, but there is a lot of definition that has to happen around what exactly that is in order to take into account issues like the ones you describe.
This has been touched on in the last few days:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23394972: Ask HN: How can a programmer help with current events? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23388597: Ask HN: Technologies to help prevent abuse of power?I am re-asking because there isn't a lot of information. I'm aware of the ACLU's Mobile Justice app...
One of Apple's Apps of the Year and Editor's Choice by Google, Sanvello is used by over 3 million individuals and rated highly by consumers and industry experts. Help us build a new class of mental health care experience, bringing together patients, providers and payers.
As the Senior Experience Designer, you will be responsible for the end to end design of the Sanvello product offerings. This role must be capable of delivering modern user-centered design and operating independently in fast paced, collaborative environment.
Reach out to me directly at dale [dot] beermann [at] sanvello [dot] com.
Skills: Front-end: Angluar JS, React, Ionic, Cordova. Back-end: Java, Jetty, Postgresql, Redis, AWS
Please reach out to dale [dot] beermann [at] sanvello.com and include "HN" in the subject.
Pacifica is the one of the largest mental health platforms in the world. Having launched in January 2015, over 2.8 million people have now signed up to improve their health and wellbeing through our mobile applications. Come help us change the way people think about mental health.
Skills: Front-end: Angluar JS, Ionic, Cordova. Back-end: Java, Jetty, Postgresql, Redis, AWS
Please reach out to dale [at] thinkpacifica.com and include "HN" in the subject.
Pacifica is the one of the largest mental health platforms in the world. Having launched in January 2015, over 2.6 million people have now signed up to improve their health and wellbeing through our mobile applications. Come help us change the way people think about mental health. We also have some big announcements we will be making soon and are looking to expand the team quickly.
Skills: Front-end: Angluar JS, Ionic, Cordova. Back-end: Java, Jetty, Postgresql, Redis, AWS
Please reach out to dale [at] thinkpacifica.com and include "HN" in the subject.
Pacifica is the one of the largest mental health platforms in the world. Having launched in January 2015, over 2.6 million people have now signed up to improve their health and wellbeing through our mobile applications. Come help us change the way people think about mental health. We also have some big announcements we will be making soon and are looking to expand the team quickly.
Skills: Front-end: HMTL, javascript, CSS, Angluar JS. Back-end: Java, Jetty, Postgresql, Redis, AWS
Please reach out to dale [at] thinkpacifica.com and include "HN" in the subject.
Pacifica is the fastest growing stress, anxiety and depression management application in the world with over 1.25 million registered users. We are looking for a self-driven individual to take over development of our mobile and web applications as we grow and expand our team. Experience with angular and corresponding web technologies is a must, and experience with hybrid mobile applications (Ionic/Cordova) is highly desirable. Ideally, you're also fluent in CSS, including CSS3 animations, and know all of the tools of the trade - node, bower, grunt, gulp, etc.
https://angel.co/pacifica-labs/jobs/128631-lead-front-end-de...
Pacifica Labs Inc. | Marketing | San Francisco, San Diego, Madison, WI | http://thinkpacifica.com
Pacifica is the fastest growing stress and anxiety management application in the world. Based on cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness, over a million people have signed up since our public launch in January 2015. We're expanding our team as we continue to provide services to mental health professionals and other organizations. Please see additional information here: https://angel.co/pacifica-labs/jobs.
Pacifica Labs, a 500 Startups company, is the fastest growing stress and anxiety management platform in the world. Having launched January 2015, over 785k people have signed up to use our mobile applications. Come help us change the way people think about mental health.
Responsibilities:
Take over day-to-day development and architecture of hybrid mobile and web applications that help hundreds of thousands of people manage stress, anxiety and depression. Must be proficient in HTML and Javascript with an emphasis on AngularJS. Knowledge of front-end architectures (MVC, MVP, MVVC) is a must.
Technologies: Ionic/Angular, Cordova/Phonegap, Java, Objective-C, HTML,CSS
Contact: [email protected] with the subject "HN"
EDIT: doesn't really address your point b) however.
There's also the fact that the bar is a bit lower to get an app finished and released with something like Ionic. So you might see more apps that aren't quite up to par, but that doesn't mean that it isn't possible to create something beautiful with them.
On any given day, it's difficult to manage everything. When you have customer service, outreach, growth, and development to do, something gets dropped. There's never quite enough time.
Then there's the difficulty in taking time off. When you try to make time for other parts of your life, you're always looking at the things that you didn't get to and thinking about when you're going to do them. I don't go to as many happy hours as I used to; I certainly don't organize them. I'm not playing volleyball right now. I try to workout, but it's hard to tear yourself away from the computer when it'll just take another hour to finish your current task. It affects your conversations, your relationships, your health, everything. It is consuming.
On any given weekday, I work at least 10 hours. Generally it's about 12-14. I make sure to take a night or two off to spend time with my fiancee. On the weekend, I try to fit in time with her as well but I'll still get in at least 4 hours each day, sometimes more like 8.
I get stressed about money a lot. We're bootstrapped so not everyone is in this situations. In any case, everything is framed in terms of how many months we have left. That 12 dollar sandwich? That's a couple days of server time. An expensive car repair? That's a whole month of our runway.
And yet, it's the most rewarding thing you can ever do. You get to build something from nothing. People use it. They talk to you about it. You are making the decisions. And it isn't going to last forever. It'll last for a long time, but it'll get better. But most importantly, I wake up every morning without an alarm and am eager to get back to work.
We created Pacifica because my co-founder, Chris, has struggled with anxiety his whole life. He came to me saying that we should try to do an app based on CBT. Personally, I've had insomnia for quite a while and I was really interested in how CBT might apply to both of our situations. We did a ton of research and Christine was one of the people we reached out to to make sure that we were adhering to the best practices in the profession.
I'm sorry you see this as snake oil. We've really tried to build an app that fits into the daily lives of people with anxiety. Furthermore, it's designed from the perspective of someone with anxiety to provide tools that you can actually use throughout your day. Is there a particular aspect of the app that you don't like or is it simply the site itself?
We really are trying to do right by the FDA. We'll go through the process to get Class I clearance as soon as we have the resources to do so. Until then, we really are not trying to make claims about treating specific disorders.
As for being based on CBT, I have not seen anything that specifically addresses that type of claim. Put another way, we're trying to help people understand the cycle between thoughts, behaviors, and feelings. To us, that's the core of CBT.
1) Right, unless you can perform voice identification having the recording doesn't matter. Your voice could be used as an identifier though, which is why I mention it. I'm sure we could do something to modulate the recording with some filters, but part of the therapy is in hearing yourself talk, so it would be a bit self defeating. As for privacy, yes, it's clear we're going to need to make a few tweaks.
2) I think allowing the user to download the data would be good for the roadmap :)
3) No, it isn't. It was actually something I put in place this week and we just haven't gotten any info on it up yet.
4) Hopefully sometime soon :)
Pacifica is a hybrid application, built on the Ionic Framework (http://ionicframework.com/). We've been pretty happy with Ionic, it's the main reason we were able to release on Android and iOS simultaneously. Thanks to Max and the Drifty team for creating a great platform.
There are a lot of comments and questions about privacy and compliance. I'll try to summarize some of my answers:
We don't technically store what's called Protected (or Private) Health Information. This is because Pacifica is a self-help tool and PHI is defined as originating from a healthcare professional. That being said, we are taking steps to treat our data as if it were PHI. We have a signed Business Associated Agreement with Amazon and are trying to operate as if we were HIPAA compliant (we technically are, in the same way that any company that doesn't store PHI is HIPAA compliant).
Regarding privacy and security: yes, we're in the cloud. Specifically, on AWS. While this may be contentious, we believe that there's no reason this is less secure than if you were hosted in a local colocation facility. Amazon has pretty rigorous requirements for who has access to machines and who can access data on those machines. Many of their services are HIPAA compliant, and they certainly take this extremely seriously.
In addition, we do try to make sure everyone's data is as safe as possible. The mobile applications communicate with our servers over HTTPS. We're using Elastic Load Balancers but don't terminate SSL at the ELB, it passes through to our own server so Amazon doesn't have the private keys. Recordings are stored encrypted in S3, and our RDS instances are also encrypted. There's more that we can do (as there always is), but we wanted to provide a little information about what we are currently trying to do to protect things. We welcome any additional suggestions.