Mobile and Web Development for ACT Team Collaboration Platform

More than 1 in 20 U.S. adults experiences serious mental illness in a given year. People living with SMI often cannot manage their own care, which puts sustained strain on providers and families. 

In the United States, much of that care is delivered through Assertive Community Treatment teams and community mental health clinics — psychiatrists, nurses, social workers, addiction counselors, and other specialists who monitor clients and intervene in a crisis.

To provide ACT teams with collaboration tools, our customer initiated the development of a mobile app and a web platform. It has become the first collaboration solution designed for ACT members. Empeek built the prototype, delivered the MVP, and continues to develop and support the product today.

Project at a glance

See our solutions for mental health providers 

Background

At the start of the project, ACT members had no way to reach an EHR quickly or communicate securely. Records were kept in print. Visits were arranged and treatment discussed by phone. Email and text messaging were not options, because neither was HIPAA-compliant. Building a detailed client profile and updating it on the go, during a visit, was impossible.

The absence of a single platform kept ACT members from collaborating, and care quality suffered for it. The organizations funding care for SMI clients absorbed the cost, because the number of avoidable emergencies kept growing. The pattern was consistent: a nurse attending a client would judge that the current medication had stopped working, and there was no fast way to get that judgment to the rest of the team. Without a change in treatment, the client’s health would decline until it became an emergency.

That problem is what prompted our customer to design an ACT team collaboration platform — a system for real-time communication and task distribution across a team that shares responsibility rather than splitting caseloads. That was the request they brought to Empeek in spring 2021, on a referral from an existing Empeek client.

Project Requirements

Our customer is a U.S. healthtech startup specializing in software for ACT teams and community mental health clinics. They engaged Empeek to cover the entire development life cycle, from discovery through maintenance, and fully outsourced delivery to a dedicated team.

The mandate was a HIPAA-compliant collaboration platform in two parts: a cross-platform mobile application for care providers, and a web platform for the administrators managing organizational processes. Underneath sat three deliverables — a back-end admin system with data collection and cloud infrastructure, the web application, and the mobile application for field teams.

The first requirement was not the production product. It was a high-fidelity frontend mockup with mocked API responses for pre-sales and user testing, allowing us to decouple UI validation from backend architecture decisions. 

Empeek ran discovery through to interactive prototype delivery in one month, and that prototype went on to support both fundraising and pre-sales.

How we run discovery stage

How the ACT Team Collaboration Platform Works

The mobile application (the field tool). Mobile is the platform’s primary access point, not a companion to it. Practitioners use it for client data, visit logging and verification, HIPAA-compliant messaging with comprehensive message auditing, and real-time crisis planning — de-escalation methods, competency and resilience training records, crisis resources, and the strategies set out in each client’s Relapse Prevention Plan. A pattern recognition module tracks previously identified and newly emerging triggers, correlates them with dates and frequency, and alerts the team.

The web platform (the command center). An administrative portal for data collection, multi-team reporting, and analytics, built to supervise several ACT teams from a single view — a requirement that shaped the data model long before it shaped the interface.

Access and roles. There is no client-facing version, and that was a design decision rather than a roadmap gap: supporting someone with serious mental illness requires professional expertise, and the platform’s job is coordinating the professionals. Access is limited to ACT members and administrators across six roles — super admin, ACT team leader, ACT program assistant, ACT team member, community resources, and CIO.

Workflow coverage. Around the clinical features sits the operational layer clinical work generates: visits and visit verification, time tracking for partial and full billing, medication delivery and logistics, Medicaid recertification, notifications, and stability metrics.

See our mobile app development services 

Project Challenges

The prototype. The first challenge was the interactive prototype. To convince ACT providers to adopt something that did not yet exist, it had to be genuinely realistic, and ready fast enough to start pre-sales. Empeek built a clickable prototype that let users navigate the full feature set of the future application, moving from initial discovery to delivery in just one month.

Geocoding under concurrent load. The harder challenge came later, in production. The field tool maps where clients are. That feature passed QA and then failed in the field, for a reason worth stating plainly: QA had been single-user, and production was not.

With several care team members resolving locations simultaneously, the geocoding layer became a bottleneck. Synchronous I/O calls blocked the thread pool, and response times stretched to roughly 40 seconds. The coordinates returned were stale. In most products that is a performance complaint. 

Here it was a clinical safety problem — a team member driving toward an active mental health crisis with 40-second-old coordinates is worse off than one with no map at all, because the map looks authoritative.

The obvious remedy was a commercial geocoding API. It failed on two counts unrelated to latency.

The Solution

Off-the-shelf geocoding fixed the symptom and broke both the unit economics and the privacy model. Two of the three requirements were non-negotiable, so the build decision made itself.

The offline engine. Empeek built a custom, fully offline geocoding service. It resolves locations from a local dataset with no outbound calls, and its index was rebuilt around a spatial structure suited to parallel reads, optimized for concurrent reads, eliminating lock contention so parallel lookups from a full team do not queue behind one another. Zero external API calls. Client addresses never cross the application boundary. Resolution under concurrent load came down from roughly 40 seconds to under 2.

Making it repeatable. The engine fixed one incident; the durable change was to onboarding. Single-user QA was replaced with simulated concurrent-user sessions matched to each clinic’s actual team size before go-live. The first clinic’s friction points were formalized into a checklist — strict data validation ahead of Medicaid import, guided walkthroughs for visit logging, notification defaults tuned to ACT team rhythms rather than clinic office hours. And the integration layer is tested against anonymized AccuMedic and Netsmart data feeds rather than a vendor’s idealized published schema, ensuring it is exercised against the malformed and partial records it will genuinely receive during file imports.

Technology Stack

• Back end: .NET 
• Web front end: React 
• Mobile: React Native, deployed to iOS and Android 
• Infrastructure: cloud-hosted back end with data loading and import/export pipelines
• EHR integrations: Netsmart and AccuMedic, via secure, one-way file-based data import pipelines 
• Location services: custom offline geocoding engine, built in-house, with no third-party API dependency
• Compliance: HIPAA/HITECH; audited messaging; patient data confined to the application boundary

Results

Each result below answers a problem we identified at the discovery stage. 

• Records were on paper, and communication was not HIPAA-compliant. Field teams now work in HIPAA-compliant messaging with comprehensive auditing, replacing print records and unencrypted text chains. Client profiles are created and updated during the visit rather than after it.
• Information moved too slowly to change treatment in time. Crisis planning, trigger tracking, and team messaging are available in the field in real time, and location resolution under concurrent use runs in under 2 seconds, down from roughly 40.
• Avoidable declines were becoming emergencies. No-shows fell from a high of 50% in October 2022 to 44% by March 2023 — a six-point improvement in continuity of care. Completed visits rose 62% against the clinics’ prior operational baseline.
• Funders were absorbing the cost. Average billing per client per month grew 109% between October 2022 and March 2023, with total team billings of $275,125 recorded through the platform. Clinics that had been submitting claims 10 to 14 days after a visit moved to same-week submission, after visit verification and Medicaid recertification tracking removed the manual spreadsheet step.
• Supervision was consuming clinical time. At the first clinic, weekly handoff meetings shortened from 60 minutes to 35 once supervisors began using the pattern recognition module for caseload review.

Life after Launch

Empeek continues to develop and support the platform. We consult our customer’s product team on technical feasibility and level of effort for proposed capabilities, provide estimates and timelines, recommend enhancements based on user feedback, and support the sales process by demonstrating the platform’s technical capabilities to prospective customers.

Confidentiality Note

This case study is published under a confidentiality agreement. The customer is not named, and clinic names, patient profiles, and identifying U.S. geographic detail have been withheld.

Get In Touch

Healthcare software providers and healthcare agencies that seek tech assistance can request our services. Empeek is a software engineering company specializing in healthcare solutions. We have launched a cardiac care mobile device, EHR and telehealth platform, wireless medical monitoring solution, and other projects featured here. Use this form to get in touch and discuss your software development needs.

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Written by:

Alex Shpachuk CEO

Alex Shpachuk is the owner and strategic partner of Empeek. His effective leadership and a visionary approach to the future of healthcare turned the company into a dynamic environment attracting the brightest minds with the common vision for product impact and service excellence. With over a decade of experience in software engineering and comprehensive knowledge of designing and deploying tailor-made solutions for healthcare providers, Alex channels his passion for software development and consulting into the written word.