Why we use Jane instead of building our own app.
We have looked at building our own platform more than once. Every time, the answer came back the same: put the money into care.
If you have shopped around for therapy, you have probably seen a few polished proprietary apps. So it is fair to wonder why we run on software we did not build ourselves.
Two reasons. It works better than what we would have made, and we would rather spend the money on therapists.
Jane is what Canadian clinics already run on.
Jane was built in North Vancouver in 2012. It is now used by more than 200,000 practitioners across roughly 50,000 clinics, most of them in Canada. A Canadian company, built for Canadian practices.
There is a decent chance you have already used it without thinking about it. If you have booked a physiotherapy appointment, seen a massage therapist, or been emailed a receipt by a chiropractor, that was very likely Jane.
You should not have to learn a new app to get help.
Starting therapy asks a lot of you. Deciding to go. Finding someone. Saying the first difficult thing out loud to a stranger.
Learning an unfamiliar app should not be on that list. When you are already stretched, familiar is worth more than novel.
The video works.
On a laptop or desktop there is nothing to download. We send you a link half an hour before your session and you click it. On an iPhone or iPad you will need the Jane app from the App Store, which takes about a minute.
The quality is good, which matters more than it sounds like it should. A therapy session is not the place to spend the first five minutes on "sorry, can you hear me now?"
We looked at building our own, and decided against it more than once
Shift is clinician-owned and family-run. We are bootstrapped, with no outside investment, so every dollar we spend is a dollar we earned.
We have seriously considered building our own platform several times over the years. Each time, the numbers said the same thing. A custom app is not hard to make look impressive. It is very hard to make genuinely reliable, secure, and pleasant to use, and it never stops needing work. We would have spent years and a great deal of money arriving roughly where Jane already is.
That money has better places to go. Therapists. Reduced-rate spots for people who need them. A Care Team that gets back to you within a day.
We would rather be excellent at care and boring about software than the other way round.
Where Jane falls short, and what we do about it.
.It is not perfect, and we would rather tell you than have you find out on your own.
The main gap is messaging. You cannot message your therapist through Jane, and they cannot message you. There is no chat and no inbox.
So if you need to get something to your therapist, whether that is cancelling, rescheduling, or passing on something you would rather they knew before your next session, tell our Care Team and we will make sure it reaches them.
That is a genuine limitation. It is also part of why our Care Team is staffed seven days a week rather than treated as an afterthought.
Questions about any of this.
Email hello@shiftcollab.com or call 1-800-661-8681. We are here Monday to Friday 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET, and Saturday to Sunday 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. ET.