Mental health apps and software are instantly accessible to clients around the clock, and convenient ways to log their thoughts or feelings in the moment. For practitioners, they can be even more insightful, providing a reliable, accurate, and timely overview of how conditions – and treatments – are progressing.
With ever so many client tracking software options available today, therapists now have a range of ways to collect ESM data, measure self-reported moods, and more. Here, we’ll explore why and how client tracking apps can help you, as well as the best software for monitoring and evaluating treatment progress.
Before you start, why not try Quenza’s client tracking tools with our 1-month plan? Our $1 trial will give you everything you need to monitor client progress in real-time, so you can stay on top of your clients’ improvements and deliver even better healthcare outcomes.
What is Client Tracking in Mental Healthcare?
As therapy tools, mental health apps and software can help therapists glean accurate, timely insights into their clients’ moods and symptoms.
By collecting a patient’s thoughts, emotions, and experiences over time, they can create a bigger, more accurate picture of their progress. Using self-report methods such as diaries, activity logs, forms, spreadsheets, and surveys, client tracking software can be helpful in monitoring and managing symptoms for a variety of mental health conditions.
Some examples include client tracking apps for:[1]
- PTSD
- Depression
- Alcohol disorder
- Suicidal behaviors
- Stress
- Sleep disorders, and
- Anxiety.
6 Benefits of Using Client Tracking Systems
Client tracking apps have several distinct edges over conventional spreadsheets or pen-and-paper journals, not least because they’re convenient and always readily available to your clients.
Client tracking software can capture more valid data than pen-and-paper measures, while decreasing the risk of recall bias and a more holistic overview of their experiences in different settings.
Whether they are accessed through a browser or smartphone app, live client tracking systems can:
- Capture more valid data, by allowing self-reporting in a client’s natural context
- Decrease the risk of recall bias, leading to improved accuracy of the data collected
- Provide a good overview of how clients feel, think, and behave in different situations, helping therapists identify triggering events or situations
- Yield more representative data on a client’s baseline states, by capturing numerous ‘samples’ over time.
For providers, they are also quick, cost-effective, and simple to integrate into therapy – often, a client’s emotions, thoughts, and experiences can be stored in one centralized system alongside their progress notes and other background information.
What Is The Best Client Tracker Software?
There is a multitude of ways that technology captures and stores patient data, from generic client tracking excel templates to online journals, fitness software, and dedicated apps with quizzes and games.
Choosing the right client tracking software for your therapy, therefore, depends on what you’d like to measure, and how.
Useful features for therapists typically include:
- Tools for designing your own measures – often, dedicated mood trackers specialize in collecting specific symptom data, e.g. sleep or nutrition trackers
- Real-time reporting – for more relevant insights
- Mobile apps – which make it simpler (and thus more realistic) for clients to log self-report data at regular intervals
- Privacy and security – as patients will often share health-related information, this can be especially important, and
- Easy-to-use features – both for clients who want to make entries, and for practitioners who want to access their reports.
Last, but not least, good client tracking systems should make it easy and quick to send reminders, a handy way to build client engagement and collect a more complete data set.
Recommended: What’s The Deal With Fitness Software? 5 Apps to Consider
Quenza App: 9 Unique Client Tracking Properties
Both from a practitioner perspective and on the client’s side, Quenza offers a range of helpful features that make it ideal for progress tracking.
Whether you’re a coach or a therapist, its toolkit can help you:
- Create customizable tracking instruments with the Activity Builder, e.g. mood diaries, thought trackers, and daily journals
- Share your tracking tools instantly with clients through a HIPAA-compliant Portal
- Remind, update, or prompt clients automatically or on demand
- Pre-schedule tracking activities for automated delivery so your clients receive them anytime, anywhere
- Monitor whether clients have received, started, or completed different activities
- View their results securely, including private and confidential entries
- Modify interventions that you’ve already saved as client tracking templates, and
- Customize validated scales, measures, and trackers from pre-made activities and templates.
As a dedicated e-therapy tool, it also allows real-time chat with those you help, a useful way to answer questions that your clients may have as they interact with your materials.
In the next section, we’ll give you a step-by-step overview of how you can create, share, and learn from your own client-tracking interventions.
How To Use Quenza’s Client Tracker Software
Quenza’s Activity Builder gives you everything you need to create unique interventions or digitalize your existing materials. With the Pathway feature, these can be arranged for automated delivery at regular or custom intervals, while you receive live results and responses in the centralized Dashboard.
Designing Measures
Creating your own client tracker spreadsheet is simple using Quenza’s drag-and-drop fields, which include customizable Likert scales, checkboxes, drop-down menus, free text fields, and more to help you design a more personal experience.
This takes a lot of the repetition out of preparing therapy materials while giving you the flexibility to track more relevant personal metrics. You might want to offer a sliding scale for mood, for instance, or sentence completion exercises to make journaling quicker and easier.
Alternatively, Quenza’s Expansion library is fully loaded with adaptable scales and measures, all of which can be completed by clients on the go with a few tweaks on your part:

The Brief Needs Check-in, for instance, offers instruction for a self-awareness activity coupled with a behavior log that’s ideal for tracking throughout the day.
Building Engagement
Client tracking spreadsheets have been around for ages, but adding an interactive element to your interventions can greatly up the client appeal of the tools you use.
Using Quenza’s Activity Builder, practitioners can integrate multimedia such as videos or images, upping the chance that they’ll log their habits, moods, or behaviors more regularly between sessions.

Incorporating your own personal images is a simple way to share prompts or tips with clients, motivating them to stay on track. Here, we’ve included an image for our client to receive through their free mobile app, but personal video messages or audio How-To’s can work just as well.
Monitoring Engagement
Quenza’s real-time progress trackers are a useful way to check whether your clients are engaging with your interventions, and access their results as soon as they are complete.
With all your client’s data in one convenient place, you can evaluate how they’re progressing with various treatments and offer prompts by sending notifications, reminders, and follow-ups:

This can be a handy patient engagement tool, giving you insight into where they might need an extra nudge, or even where you might amend your interventions to make them more appealing.
Storing Client Data
Whether you’re collecting experience sampling data throughout the day, or storing a patient’s weekly behavior journal, client tracking means handling protected health information (PHI) that must be shared and stored according to HIPAA requirements.
Quenza’s entire platform is thoroughly encrypted in accordance with GDPR and HIPAA regulation, meaning that all your patient’s data is retained per the recommended privacy and security guidelines.
Because both Android and Apple smartphone apps are secured in the same way, all entries, chats, and results are visible only to you and your patient.
Final Thoughts
Monitoring how your client feels, thinks, and behaves over time is an immensely powerful way to provide more personal, and thus more effective treatments – while giving you a good understanding of what you’re doing right.
Starting with a clear idea of what you’d like to measure, and how it aligns with your patient’s goals, is a great way to take your therapy to the next level. If you’ve got tips to add to this article, we’d love to hear them in a comment.
Hopefully, this article has inspired you to share your own tracking measures and interventions with clients. If you’re keen to collect ESM data to enhance your client treatments, don’t forget to check out our 30-day trial for $1 for everything you need to get started. With live insights, HIPAA-compliant PHI storage, and user-friendly activity design tools, you can create your own measures in no time.
References
- ^ Wang, K., Varma, D. S., & Prosperi, M. (2018). A systematic review of the effectiveness of mobile apps for monitoring and management of mental health symptoms or disorders. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 107, 73.