What is Electronic Therapy? Your Ultimate Success Guide

With an increasingly digital world, more and more services are being provided online, including therapy. It’s a service that’s perfectly suited to the electronic format, as most treatment methods and techniques can be easily adapted to the telephone and video chat mediums.

As a therapist, you want to stay up to date on what’s happening in the field so you can provide the best service possible for your clients. This guide will help you do just that!

Read on to learn about how to become a successful online therapist.

Before you read on, we thought you might like to try our 30-day professional trial of Quenza for just $1.

Our electronic therapy software will help you treat others digitally with unique, custom-branded solutions of your own, and equip you with everything you need to run your practice easily online.

What is Electronic Therapy?

Electronic therapy is the provision of mental health services via an electronic format, including telephone, video conferencing, online chat, and even virtual reality technology.[1] You might hear it referred to as “teletherapy”, “telepsychology”, “online therapy” or even the shortened “e-therapy.”

Electronic therapy is helping to fill the growing need for mental health services around the globe. As awareness increases and stigma decreases, more and more people are seeking out professional help for their mental health challenges.

However, therapy is not equally accessible for everyone who seeks it out. Time, money, and distance from a provider are among the biggest barriers to receiving treatment, along with a dearth of qualified mental health services providers.

Although electronic therapy can’t solve all of these problems, it can help. With the availability of online therapy sessions, clients can now access treatment from anywhere in the world—as long as they have a stable internet connection. Electronic therapy allows them to cast a far wider net to ensure they match with a provider who can help them with their unique needs.

It’s not right for everybody or in every situation, but it will work for the majority of people that are looking for help with the mental health struggles they are facing.

4 Types of Digital Therapy

Digital therapy can be offered in much the same way as in-person therapy; except in rare cases, just about any kind of therapy that is provided in person can also be provided digitally, including cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), and even eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR).

However, there are four modes in which digital therapy is usually offered:

1. Telephone: in this mode, all of the therapeutic services are provided via telephone calls between the provider and the client. Therapy sessions are held at a specific time, at which the provider calls the client (or vice versa) to engage in talk therapy.
2. Videoconference: this mode of digital therapy is similar to in-person therapy, in that the therapist and client can see each other and speak to each other in real-time. This mode has the added benefit of incorporating facial expressions and body language into the therapy sessions, which can help with diagnosis and treatment.
3. Chat/Messaging: in this form, there may not be any “sessions” per se, but the therapist and client can message back and forth whenever is convenient for them. This is usually facilitated by an app or software downloaded to the therapist and client’s computer and/or phone. Communication does not happen in real-time, but at the convenience of both parties.
4. Combination: some therapeutic partnerships may engage in a combination of some or all of these treatment modes, utilizing telephone calls, video chats, and/or chat/messaging when appropriate. The most common combination is likely having regularly scheduled sessions (via telephone and/or video chat) with messaging and resource sharing in between as needed.

All of these types of electronic therapy can be effective, given that it’s the right choice for the situation.

Is Electronic Therapy Effective?

Electronic therapy has shown to be just as effective as in-person therapy when practiced correctly.

In a word: yes!

Electronic therapy has shown to be just as effective as in-person therapy when practiced correctly.[2]

Research has found that online therapy is effective in the following scenarios, among others:

• CBT for clients struggling with symptoms of anxiety and/or depression[3]
• CBT for reducing depression[4]
• Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SBT) for reducing symptoms in people with mild to moderate anxiety[5]
• CBT and Cognitive Processing Therapy for treating reducing symptoms in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)[6]

As long as the provider is dedicated to using evidence-based techniques and building a strong therapeutic relationship with the client, online therapy can be just as effective as in-person therapy, and at even greater convenience for both parties.

Become The Ultimate Online Therapist

If your goal is to provide your clients with the best possible treatment, then you’ll want to stay up-to-date on the most popular, most effective, and most convenient formats and techniques.

One way to make sure you don’t miss anything in the ever-expanding world of online therapy is to continue following this blog.

Our mission is to help service providers work at maximum effectiveness, boosting their therapy practice and becoming more effective helpers in the process.

If you find our content useful and you’re ready to take your own practice to the next level, it’s time to consider using Quenza, the app designed to streamline your treatment process, enhance your effectiveness, and expand your reach.

6 Tools Included in Quenza

Quenza offers therapists the ability to create their own custom content, communicate securely with clients, and provide the tools necessary to help clients meet their therapeutic goals.

Among the many features and tools in Quenza, therapists will find:

• A drag-and-drop Activity Builder so you can create exercises, assignments, assessments, quizzes, interactive activities, and any other resources you think your clients would benefit from. Choose from text boxes, multiple-choice questions, text entry, drop-downs, and many other items to design effective resources for your clients. When you’re done, save them to your personal resource library.
• A Pathway Builder that allows you to create carefully curated treatment pathways that bundle activities and resources into streamlined sequences you can send to your clients at the push of a button. Create unique pathways for the issues and challenges you often see your clients facing.
• A vast library of evidence-based Activities and Pathways, designed to provide effective training, learning, and growth for your clients. Choose a premade pathway and send it as-is, or customize it to suit your clients’ unique needs.
• A client app that sends push notifications, updates, and reminders that will keep your clients engaged and on track. It’s offered in 16 languages and provides a way to communicate securely with your clients between sessions or activities, fully encrypted.
• Progress tracking and management, so you can see your clients’ results as soon as they finish an activity or pathway; you can choose whether to allow your clients see their results too. You can even download or print them out in PDF format.
• White label customization, so your content looks like your content. Use your own logo, your own colors, and your own email address to send content.

With Quenza, you’re free to design the customized resources and pathways that will meet the needs of your clients. And if you can’t find what you need, don’t worry—there’s tons of support in the Quenza blog, our support section, and the community of other Quenza users.

4 Ways Quenza Can Help with Therapy Notes

As a therapist, you know that therapy notes are a vital piece of your work, but that they can easily get messy and disorganized.

Quenza is a great resource for keeping your therapy notes organized and in one place.

Here’s how the notes feature works:

1. Add a note on your clients at any time by navigating to your client’s profile and clicking on “Notes.” Next, click “+ Note” and a new notes page will open.
2. Notes are only visible to you, the therapist, and not to your clients, so you’re free to jot down whatever you need to.
3. You can even add a date- and/or time-stamp to your notes to help you keep them organized.
4. Everything is fully encrypted, GDPR-compliant, and HIPAA-compliant, so you can rest easy knowing your notes are secure.

If you’re currently taking notes by hand or in a word processor, you’ll find Quenza’s note section to be extremely valuable. It takes care of the organization and security for you, leaving you with more time and energy to devote to your clients.

Final Thoughts

Electronic therapy is here to stay, and that’s a good thing; it makes therapy more accessible and available to a wider range of people, it is generally more convenient for both therapist and client than in-person therapy, and it allows you to use a greater variety of tools and resources to help your clients.

If you’re just starting out in your electronic therapy journey, it is strongly recommended that you consider an app to help you manage your online practice. A good therapy app will take away some of the burden of the most draining parts of any therapy practice: paperwork, organization, and administration.

Quenza is a great option, but feel free to check out our piece on other software options while you’re here, and be sure to check back in and see what’s new on our blog!

We hope you enjoyed this guide. Don’t forget to start your $1 trial of Quenza’s electronic therapy toolkit.

Our all-in-one e-therapy solution will give you a powerful, HIPAA-compliant way to help your patients digitally, so that you can make your solutions more accessible to those that need them most.

References