Our story
Steady was built by a psychology practice and a software company in Gqeberha, for a question every psychologist has: how has this person really been since I last saw them?
The question
At VR Clinical Psychology, sessions were weekly or fortnightly, but the days in between were mostly guesswork. Patients arrive and try to sum up two weeks in a few sentences. The good days blur, the last bad one looms large, and the psychologist has to work from that.
The practice wanted something simple: patients say how they are while it’s happening, do the questionnaires and exercises they’ve been given, and the psychologist sees it before the next session. Without making therapy feel like data entry, and without anyone’s information leaving the practice’s hands.
The first attempt
We started by running an existing open-source research platform for the practice. It could do a great deal, but it was built for large research studies, not a practice of three psychologists, and keeping it running took more than it gave back.
So in 2026 we started again with something small, and called it Steady.
Building it together
The partnership is simple. VR Clinical Psychology decides the clinical side: what’s asked, how it’s scored, what’s flagged, and every word patients read about their care. OpenWorks IT builds the app, runs the servers and looks after the practices that use it.
That split matters. The people who sit with patients decide what’s good for them, and the people who write the code make it work, safely, every day.
Steady went through two rounds of testing with the practice before going to the App Store and Google Play.
Why it’s open source
OpenWorks IT makes free and open-source software. Steady’s code is public under the GNU AGPL, for three reasons:
- Trust. Anyone can check how Steady treats patients’ information, instead of taking our word for it.
- No lock-in. A practice is never stuck with us. It can take its server, and the code, elsewhere.
- Shared work. When one practice asks for something useful, every practice gets it.
We earn our keep by hosting Steady, supporting the practices that use it, and developing it with them. Not by charging licence fees.
What’s next
- The community. A private forum where psychologists who use Steady can discuss the science, build questionnaires together and plan studies across practices. Only totals ever leave a practice, never individual records.
- More practices. Each one on its own server, with its own name and logo.
- Research, carefully. With patients’ consent, watch data and check-ins can become a baseline for understanding how people do between sessions.
Credits
The science and research behind Steady: Kempie van Rooyen (kempie@vrpsych.co.za) and VR Clinical Psychology, a clinical psychology practice in Gqeberha with its roots in research into traumatic stress. They decide and sign off everything clinical in Steady: the check-in, the questionnaires and how they’re scored, the exercises, the flags, and every word patients read about their care and safety.
The code and development: OpenWorks IT, a small software company in Gqeberha that builds and supports open-source software, mostly for healthcare. OpenWorks IT writes and maintains Steady, runs the practices’ servers and the community forum, and supports the practices that use it.
The questionnaires built into Steady belong to their authors and are used under their own terms; their original papers are on the science page.