Building PsychMeter

The purpose of this blog is to share useful information with PsychMeter users, including guides and insights to make your life easier. F or this inaugural post, I thought I’d share the journey behind building PsychMeter. Although the site is still in its early days, a few people have asked how this project began, so here’s a look behind the scenes.

I’m Riz, the creator and operator of PsychMeter. I hold a degree in Computer Engineering from Queen’s University and an MBA from the University of Toronto. I’ve worked in tech and startups for over 20 years, and I have a passion for building things. I’m a maker through and through, and I’ve launched many projects over the years.

I live in Canada with my wife, and we have two kids (a boy and a girl) and a tiny dog who keeps us on our toes.

About a year ago, my wife—a clinical psychologist—launched her private practice, The BrainSpace Clinic. Around the same time, I had recently moved on from a role at a late-stage startup, giving me the free time to help her set things up. This meant figuring out solutions for the clinic's billing, invoicing, and client questionnaires, including intake and consent forms.

Initially, I considered purchasing an existing platform for these needs. However, I found the available options were either difficult to use, not compliant with PHIPA/HIPAA, poorly suited for multi-person practices, overly complex for smaller clinics, or simply too expensive.

In the end, I built her website and also, in a hidden section for clinic team members, created a billing, invoicing, and client questionnaire system. Learning about healthcare privacy laws was quite an adventure, but I managed to launch the site, and it worked well for her practice.

A few months later, my wife needed to document her professional development activities from the past two years for the College. The manual tracking process was time-consuming, so I built a free tool to streamline it, which saved her significant time and stress. She shared this tool with the College mailing list, and through it, I connected with more clinical psychologists, some of whom mentioned the need for a reliable tool for client questionnaires. That’s when I decided to make a publicly available version of the tools I had built for her practice.

With that feedback, I got to work on building PsychMeter. I started by creating the “skeleton” of the site, leveraging the existing code from my wife's clinic. Next, I digitized common questionnaires like the GAD-7 and PHQ-9, and then I added Custom Questionnaires, enabling users to create intake forms, consent forms, and authorizations to share PHI.

Throughout this journey, I also navigated the complex requirements for PHIPA/HIPAA compliance. Building the site was challenging, but the compliance work was even tougher. Securing agreements and the necessary Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) with large corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google was not easy—they don’t exactly make the process smooth for small entities. Fortunately, I eventually got Google’s attention and could proceed with launching PsychMeter.

That brings us to today. I’m continuing to add questionnaires and improve PsychMeter to support its small but growing community of clinicians. Each update is driven by the feedback I receive, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions, please feel free to reach out. PsychMeter is here to make your practice easier, and I’m excited to see where we go from here.