The community
Every practice that uses Steady joins a community of psychologists: a private forum to talk about the science, build questionnaires together, plan studies across practices, and decide where Steady goes next.
Why a community
A single practice sees its own patients. Several practices, comparing notes, see much more: which questionnaires work in South African practice, which exercises patients actually do, what the patterns between sessions look like across hundreds of people rather than a handful.
Steady already gathers that kind of information inside each practice. The community is where psychologists turn it into shared knowledge, without patients’ information ever leaving their own practice.
It starts with VR Clinical Psychology’s psychologists, and grows with every practice that joins. Kempie van Rooyen leads it.
What happens there
- Clinical practice. Using check-ins and flags well, fitting Steady into therapy, what works and what doesn’t.
- Research and studies. Papers worth reading, and planning studies that run across several practices.
- Questionnaires and tools. Writing and testing new questionnaires, exercises and score bands together, and sorting out their licences. What the community builds can go into Steady for everyone.
- Steady’s development. Ideas, problems and what comes next, discussed directly with OpenWorks IT, who build it.
- A private space per practice, if a practice wants one, for its own psychologists only.
Studies across practices
When practices run a study together, each one keeps its patients’ information on its own server. Only totals and averages are shared, never individual records, and only from patients who have agreed to take part.
The rules
These hold for everyone, the administrators included.
- Invitation only. Nobody can sign up on their own, and you must be signed in to see anything.
- Two-step sign-in for every account, with an authenticator app. No signing in with Google, Facebook or any other outside account.
- No patient-identifying information, ever. No names or initials, no dates of birth, ID or file numbers, no screenshots of patient screens or notes, and no case details that together could point to one person. Talk about patterns, methods and made-up examples.
- Study data only as totals. Never individual records.
If something slips through, an administrator deletes it for good, edit history included.
What OpenWorks IT sees
OpenWorks IT hosts the forum, so we’ve been careful about our own access. Our accounts can read and post only in Announcements and Steady development. In the clinical areas we see only numbers, such as how many members, topics and posts there are, so we know the community is healthy. We never see titles, posts or who wrote what.
Kempie, as the community’s lead, holds the administrator role. Like any hosting company, OpenWorks IT can technically reach the server it runs; we use that access only to keep the forum running.
Who can join
Psychologists at practices that use Steady, invited by the community’s lead. Access is included in every practice’s monthly fee. Psychologists who run Steady on their own servers can join for a separate fee.
The forum lives at community.steadyapp.co.za and opens to member practices soon.