BRDG

Inspiration

Edgewood is a mental health organization providing support to children and families in crisis. We wanted to help them make their offerings more accessible to youth and provide them support before or after their stay at one of Edgewood’s facilities.

What it does

Edgy enables youth to get connected with Edgewood’s services in an easy-to-navigate way. They are able to reach out to an Edgewood mental health professional from the comfort of their phone. They also have easy access to online and in-person support groups and other peer events, as well as a library of video resources and toolkits to help youth on a daily basis.

Features & Functionality: Login Self-assessment Understand how often the client experienced difficult emotions and to what extent In order to recommend and connect the user to the right resources

Home Upcoming Appointment or Peer Event Notification SOS button Option to reach out by phone or in-person to Edgewood Crisis Facility Daily well-being self-assessment Recommended Video

Groups An overview of the virtual events and in-person events that Edgewood offers Virtual chat room With a trained mental health profession as the moderator of the conversation Users can jump in and talk about their experiences with the topic Easy access to Food Banks and Drop In locations

Programs Introduction to Edgewood A highlight of its affordability Selection of Edgewood Services Appointment tool with mental health professionals Provider video introduction Sorting tool to identify the soonest available providers A multitude of options to interact with providers (phone, text, video, in person) Encouraging messages

Library A hub of all the resources that Edgewood offers, which includes mental health advice videos, worksheets, activities, etc. Videos on mental health topics Toolkits - worksheets and other Edgewood activities (Goal Setting, Wellness Wheel, Strengths Identification)

How we built it

We collaborated in FigJam, sharing our brainstorming and research there, as well as creating the app flow. Then our designers translated the wireframes into Hi-Fi Prototype in Figma.

Challenges we ran into

We weren’t able to get a hold of former Edgewood clients to understand their experience and needs better. We also had to understand the robust offering of Edgewood services and distill them into a manageable interface. And finally, we had to make adjustments to some of the current Edgewood offerings, in the spirit of making them more accessible and scalable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that despite not being able to adhere to our projected schedule, we didn’t fully panic. We are also extremely proud of our design team who stay up at odd hours, working from opposite sides of the globe. Despite some initial disagreements within the team, we were able to incorporate everyone’s suggestions and came up with a better product.

What we learned

We learned that providing affordable mental health care services to the masses is a challenging problem to solve because there are multiple problems to take on from leveraging the business model to creating accessible and delightful experiences for youth. We also learned that Edgewood provides enormous programs ranging from supporting the children and their families on their entire mental health journey. We learned how complex it may be to simplify access to such numerous services, and that sometimes prioritization needs to take place to solve the issue at hand.

What's next for BRDG

BRDG hopes that Edgy would become the staple Edgewood app, where self-assessment is aligned with Edgewood’s offerings and resources, along with plans for expansion to cater to parents as well. Additional possibilities include: creating a client profile and allowing Edgewood to monitor their clients in between their in-person stays, adjusting current programming to lend itself better to virtual engagements, creating short, relatable mental health videos to add to the Library, adding video descriptions in relatable language to the descriptions of Edgewood programs or add a localizator for food banks and drop-in centers.

Built With

• figjam
• figma