How Anise has Leveraged Tellescope’s Developer-Friendly Chat and Scheduling APIs

Year Founded: 2021

Headquarters: New York, NY

Website: https://anisehealth.co  

What is Anise Health:

Anise Health is a culturally responsive digital mental health platform building the gold standard of care for people of color. Their technology-enabled, holistic care model is initially designed to drive outcomes for the Asian population and their team of licensed therapists and certified behavioral coaches are trained to understand cultural issues and deliver personalized care. 

What challenges was Anise Health facing prior to using Tellescope? 

Anise needed a HIPAA-compliant system for secure chat and self-scheduling. Anise had many internally built tools, so they needed a developer-friendly and API-driven solution that they could integrate into their tech stack. 

Since building this functionality from scratch would take months and distract from the development of their proprietary care model, they wanted a vendor who could do the heavy lifting.

Key Challenges:

• Point solutions for scheduling like Calendly didn't integrate nicely into their tech stack and didn’t meet HIPAA compliance requirements
• Many vendors offered individuals tools for things like secure chat, scheduling, and video chat which would require Anise to integrate multiple tools rather than having a comprehensive solution
• Since they were initially offering self-pay monthly telehealth subscriptions, they needed a way to limit self-scheduling to only states where providers were licensed and dates within which the subscription was active

At the time Anise came across Tellescope, they were conducting an RFP for EHR vendors that were API-friendly and comprehensive so that they could implement key features using one platform to save on costs (i.e. scheduling, secure chat).

 Additionally, Anise wanted the flexibility to push and pull data from this vendor such that all appointment and clinical information could be stored and used by its own backend system to personalize care. 

For example, Anise was interested in limiting users to scheduling only four sessions per month and preventing scheduling beyond the subscription renewal date. The ability to customize the front end to implement these requirements was key to building on top of Anise’s existing portal user interface. 

Anise looked at bigger players like Athena, Healthie, and Acuity but Tellescope stood out because it offered a lightweight option of the features needed, including scheduling and secure chat, at a favorable cost and a much faster implementation timeline. 

Additionally, Tellescope's API endpoints and data pipeline allowed Anise to easily push and pull data between the two systems, aligning well with Anise’s long-term data strategy.

"The cherry on top was that the sales process and interaction with customer service were very positive; it was clear that Anise’s needs would be prioritized, Anise’s questions would be addressed quickly, and feature requests would be added to the roadmap, making it a true partnership as both Tellescope and Anise grew." - Nisha Desai, COO

The Anise team gained access to the Tellescope environments to begin implementation within 1-2 weeks of signing a contract! It took 1 full-stack developer on Anise’s team ~1 month to build the initial integration for secure chat and ~3 months to build the initial integration for scheduling. They went live with both features immediately after they were implemented and tested, respectively. 

Tellescope has enabled Anise to seamlessly integrate secure messaging and scheduling into their provider and client platforms.

Since Anise primarily works with part-time providers, Tellescope allows them to set their working hours each day and allows them to restrict scheduling to clients located where they’re licensed.

Additionally, Tellescope’s calendar integrations with Google Calendar and Outlook have made it easy for providers to manage any potential outside conflicts.

Anise was able to repurpose developer time to focus on refactoring the platform infrastructure to support insurance and revenue cycle management as well as addressing feature requests coming directly from patients, including resource recommendations, provider reviews, progress dashboards, onboarding updates, and more. 

Furthermore, Anise developers were able to separately integrate with a low-cost EHR for providers to submit visit notes directly from the Anise provider portal and attach it to appointments using the scheduling data from Tellescope. 

Lastly, Anise developers were able to continuously focus on security enhancements, addressing bugs and improvements to Anise’s back-end architecture to support scale.

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