Tools For Therapists: How To Effortlessly Create Activities

Therapy tools need to be thoughtfully goal-aligned to be effective, with careful consideration to a patients’ needs, interests, and lifestyle.

It’s precisely what makes tool design so cumbersome as your practice client list grows, and exactly why so many blended care practitioners are embracing digital. If you’re looking for a more scalable, efficient to deliver uniquely personalized therapy tools, read on for our full guide to Quenza’s simple but powerful therapy toolbox.

Before you continue, we think you’d enjoy our 30-day full access trial of Quenza’s toolbox for therapists. With specially designed features to help you build and apply your own e-therapy tools, Quenza will give you everything you need to deliver professional blended care treatments, so you can make a bigger positive impact on the mental health of those you help.

The Importance of Tools in Therapy

Therapy tools are the approaches, techniques, interventions, and resources that counselors, psychiatrists, and therapists use in mental health treatment.

They can accompany various types of therapy, including but not limited to:

• Cognitive-behavioral Therapy (or online CBT) for depression or anxiety
• Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) for autism or socio-emotional learning
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
• Aversion Therapy (e.g. tools such as Graded Exposure frameworks)
• Group Therapy, to encourage peer support or EQ skills development, or
• Play Therapy for treating children with mental health or behavioral challenges.

The range of evidence-based tools for therapists to choose from is extensive, with some having a specific goal (e.g. Graded Exposure for phobias) and others suiting a wide array of therapy types (e.g. habit diaries, mood trackers).

6 Types of Tools Favored By Psychologists

So what does a therapist’s toolbox look like in practice?

Depending on a mental healthcare provider’s specialty, the tools they employ as part of treatment might include:

1. Assessments: Which explore a client’s challenges and goals or better understand their status
2. Lessons: That empower and inform patients through psychoeducation
3. Exercises: Which guide clients through goal-related activities or interventions
4. Meditations: E.g. a Mindfulness Meditation for stress management, or Personal Needs Meditation for problem-focused solutions
5. Metaphors: For self-awareness or self-expression, or
6. Reflections: Which can challenge problematic perspectives and behavior, or create clarity for better decision-making and self-management.

4 Advantages of Using Digital Tools

Therapy tools are the approaches, techniques, interventions, and resources that counselors, psychiatrists, and therapists use in mental health treatment.

In blended care, the right digital tools play an important role in a patient’s healthcare experience, as well as their outcomes.

Not only do thoughtfully designed tools help clients achieve their mental health goals more effectively, but specific tools that are aligned with a patient’s needs, interests, and objectives can also successfully make a client’s treatment more engaging and rewarding.

According to research by Bunnell and colleagues, tools for therapists can be instrumental in:[1]

1. Challenging problematic thinking that a patient may have about their condition
2. Help them cultivate more adaptive perspectives
3. Develop a more proactive and informed attitude toward their wellbeing and treatment, and
4. Equip them with self-management strategies that can encourage better health-related outcomes.

Because patient health engagement hinges heavily on how informed a client is about their treatment, as well as how involved they are in therapy, practitioners who take a collaborative, personal approach to tool design can potentially make a big difference in their clients’ outcomes.

When it comes to e-therapy in particular, personalized digital therapy tools can have a range of benefits, including:

• Making therapy more convenient: Increasing the likelihood that patients will adhere to their treatment for long enough to benefit from it
• Providing more cost-effective treatment: This allows a broader range of patients to benefit from necessary, but otherwise cost-prohibitive treatments
• Greater accessibility: Digital tools such as mental health apps can be easily used by patients in geographically remote locations, as well as mobility-impaired demographics, and
• More appealing treatments: Interactive or ‘gamified’ treatments can be a clever way to make therapy more interesting or engaging for particular groups, such as young adults or children.

Creating and Using Tools: Best Digital Platform

A customizable, all-in-one digital platform isn’t just the fastest way to create professional therapy tools of your own – it’s also the easiest.

This is because integrated therapy software like Quenza is specially designed to be a complete toolkit, ensuring you have everything you need to design, build, modify, and deliver your digital therapy tools conveniently.

By choosing a customizable solution, you also have the freedom and flexibility to broaden your offer, meaning you can create highly specific or bespoke solutions that outperform most generic worksheets in terms of efficacy.

Quenza is purpose-built to work both for you and your clients and comes with critical features to cover all aspects of your tool design and delivery, including:

• Activity Building tools: that help you create tailored, personalized therapy tools
• A Pathway Builder: that you can use to organize, sequence, schedule, and automate your tool delivery, creating care pathways or treatment plans
• Live Results Tracking: saving you the effort of manual data collection, while reducing the risk of administrative errors at your e-clinic or surgery
• Secure Instant Messaging: so you can stay in touch with patients throughout their programs
• HIPAA-compliance: for secure storage of all your patient results, practice forms, chat logs, and therapy notes
• Notifications, Updates, and Reminders: to build engagement and improve patient retention at your practice.

Using Quenza’s Toolbox: A Roadmap

While Quenza’s therapy toolbox is brilliantly easy to use, the range of different interventions, activities, and solutions you can create with its features is extensive.

Not only can you tailor all your digital therapy tools to specific patient goals, but you can also share them under your professional brand as part of comprehensive custom pathways or programs.

In a few steps, you can use Quenza to:

1. Build Activities such as meditations, worksheets, homework, exercises, metaphors, lessons, video tutorials, or psychoeducational interventions from scratch or an Expansion Library template
2. Organize your personalized therapy tools into Pathways (e.g. mental health plans, e-courses, or therapeutic solutions), and
3. Schedule them for automatic delivery in an order that suits your treatment plan or program.

Use this easy step-by-step guide below for an example.

How To Send Assessment Tools in Quenza

One great example of a widely used assessment tool is the Wheel of Life, a self-report measure used to help patients explore their satisfaction levels with various life domains.

Quenza’s Expansion Library comes with a free, ready-to-customize Wheel of Life template that you can save, open as a copy, and modify before sending to your clients with custom domains, scales, and more – but if you’re keen to get creative, it’s also possible to create your own from scratch with your Activity Builder. Click here for a step by step guide to building your own digital Wheel of Life in seconds!

Simply create a blank template and drag different elements into your new therapy tool to add free-text fields, check boxes, custom scales, page breaks, and other elements to your new Activity:

Because Quenza’s Activity Builder also supports any custom videos, audio, images, or PDFs you might want to include, you can design interactive solutions for maximum patient engagement.

With your introduction, self-reflection prompts, and sections created, simply click your Wheel of Life option to start creating a bespoke therapy tool that is relevant to your patient:

Once you’ve saved your template, you might want to send your assessment tool as is, or you might want to include it as a step in a particular care pathway; to do so, head to your Pathways Tool to create a new pathway:

As this screenshot shows, your Pathway Builder is where you can easily time the delivery of various program steps in advance, with custom intervals between different tools you want to share. You can also set reminders for separate assessment tools, exercises, or interventions that will prompt your patients to complete any unfinished activities after specific intervals.

Your therapy tools will be delivered automatically to Quenza’s free client portal on your patient’s connected device, so they can log in and complete your assessment privately and securely at any time.

In a nutshell, Quenza makes it easy and efficient for you to design your own digital solutions, deliver them to patients, collect their responses, and stay in touch on one HIPAA-compliant platform.

With a powerful therapy toolbox at your fingertips, you can craft specialized tools that match your clients’ needs and help them achieve their mental health goals more effectively.

Final Thoughts

The more confident you become with Quenza’s therapy toolkit, the more creative and effective your resulting solutions can be.

Use this resource as a starting point for building your digital therapeutic arsenal, and you’ll swiftly find the range of ways to engage and empower your patients growing fast.

We hope you enjoyed this article. Don’t forget to start your 1 dollar, 30 day trial of Quenza’s tools for therapists to start designing your own e-mental health solutions.

Quenza’s specialized toolkit will augment your professional impact as a counselor, therapist, or mental health coach, and includes everything you need to help others virtually with your own unique treatments and interventions.

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