Swinburne University’s National eTherapy Centre has partnered with medtech startup Coviu to allow Australians to access quality mental health services through encrypted, real-time text chat sessions.

The service is offered as part of Swinburne’s Mental Health Online, which is free for all Australians and provides access to treatment programs for common mental health issues including depression and anxiety.

Real-time text chat sessions with clinicians will now be a part of the service, alongside email and video calls, offering an additional modality to suit a broader remit of needs within the community.  

THE LARGER TREND

In April this year, Swinburne partnered with Coviu for telehealth education. The partnership sees Swinburne embedding Coviu’s technology into the curriculum of nursing, occupational therapy, psychology, dietetics, health science, and digital health and informatics. The technology has also been implemented into Swinburne’s new Master of Physiotherapy and Graduate Certificate in Teleaudiology.

ON THE RECORD

“Since being rolled out in March this year, the chat sessions have become a very popular option amongst our clients. It’s now one of the most common modalities we use to support clients in completing their online mental health program. For many clients, a real-time text chat session is a practical first step into talking with a health practitioner, which for some can be quite confronting,” said Dr Liz Seabrook, Digital Mental Health Fellow at Swinburne, in a statement.

CEO and co-founder of Coviu Dr Silvia Pfeiffer said: “Our goal is to make healthcare services easily accessible and usable to all citizens, and this partnership with Swinburne’s Mental Health Online service takes us another step closer. We work hard to ensure our telehealth technology is easy to use, and are constantly looking at new ways for people to use the service. I’m thrilled to hear the text-only chat sessions are helping hundreds of people across Australia.”