For practices
Steady gives you a view of the days between sessions without adding to your admin. Here's what you get, what it costs, and how to start.
What you see
Your home screen is your patient list. Patients with something worth a look come first: an unreviewed flag, a missed run of check-ins, or a finished questionnaire. Open a patient and you see their last fortnight as a line, their own words from each check-in, their questionnaire scores over time and, if they’ve chosen to share it, a daily summary from their watch.
Flags are review aids, not risk scores. Steady highlights PHQ-9 item 9, low mood in three check-ins in a row, high scores and missed check-ins, so you can decide what they mean. You mark a flag as reviewed when you’ve looked at it.
Steady doesn’t diagnose, doesn’t predict, and isn’t watched around the clock. Every patient screen says so and shows crisis numbers.
Questionnaires and exercises
Built in: PHQ-9, GAD-7, PCL-5 and WHO-5, and five exercises: box breathing, 4-7-8 breathing, slow paced breathing, 5-4-3-2-1 grounding and a thought record. Send any of them once, daily or weekly, with a note such as “Before Thursday’s session, please.”
You can also:
- Write your own questionnaires and exercises in the app, with your own answer scale, score bands and review flags.
- Import from the open ReproSchema library (more than 90 validated instruments), from a FHIR Questionnaire file, or from a Steady file a colleague shares.
Every instrument carries a licence status. Imported ones wait as “Check licence” until you confirm your practice may use them, so nothing goes to a patient by accident. More on the science.
Your notifications
You get a notification when a patient checks in or finishes something you sent. It says only that there’s something new. Names and health details stay inside the app, behind your sign-in.
Exports for the clinical file
Export a patient’s report, with charts, to PDF, or one or all of your patients to Excel. The clinical record stays yours. Steady is a between-session tool, not your file.
Your server
Each practice gets its own Steady server, hosted in South Africa:
- Your name and logo in the app your patients use, and your own web address, such as
yourpractice.steadyapp.co.zaor one on your own domain. - Two-step sign-in for psychologists and administrators, from devices you’ve linked.
- An access log of every time a patient’s information is opened.
- Encrypted backups every night.
- Signed updates. A new version installs on your server only if OpenWorks IT has signed it. The master psychologist can install updates from the app.
Privacy and security in detail.
Support, training and the community
OpenWorks IT sets up your server, trains you and your colleagues, answers questions, and keeps Steady up to date. Changes that practices ask for go into Steady for everyone.
Every practice also joins the Steady community: a private forum of psychologists, invitation only and with two-step sign-in, to talk about the science, build questionnaires together, plan studies across practices and shape what Steady does next. No patient information is ever posted there. About the community.
What it costs
There are no licence fees: Steady is free, open-source software. You pay OpenWorks IT:
- A once-off onboarding fee to set up your server, branding and accounts, and train your team.
- One monthly fee for hosting, updates, support, training and the forum. Not per patient, and not per psychologist.
There are two published plans, one for a solo psychologist and one for a practice of up to three, and a quote for larger practices. Ask us for current prices. Patients never pay anything.
Getting started
- Talk to us. We’ll show you Steady on a demo practice and answer your questions.
- We set up your server, with your name and logo.
- We train you and your colleagues.
- You invite your first patients. Start with a few, see how it fits your work, then widen it.
Questions practices ask
Do patients pay? No. The app is free in the App Store and on Google Play.
Which phones does it work on? iPhones and Android phones. Watch data comes from Apple Health on iPhone and Health Connect on Android.
Is it a chat app? No. Patients can’t message you through Steady, which keeps it from becoming an after-hours channel.
Can I use my own domain? Yes. Or use an address under steadyapp.co.za if you don’t have one.
Can we host it ourselves? Yes. The code and the setup guide are on GitHub under the GNU AGPL. Most practices would rather we did it.
Does it work for psychiatrists? It’s built for psychologists, but nothing in it stops a psychiatrist using it, and a longer list of patients seen less often is where between-visit check-ins may help most. Talk to us.