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Case study~8 min read

One clinical-notes editor for web, mobile and desktop.

Behavioral-health clinicians can spend as long documenting a session as delivering it. We came on as product owner for a documentation tool built to make that faster and better, and to meet clinicians on whatever they had in hand: a browser, a phone in the session room, or an installed desktop app. Online or offline, it had to be the same editor.

Cross-platformClinical DocumentationOffline-firstProduct Ownership
progress-note · mobileshared editor
React Native shell offline-ok
expansions
Client reports reduced anxiety since last sessionexpand “pt” → “patient”
nativeeditor
native ↔ editor · message bridge
Introduction

One product, three runtimes, zero compromises

The product is a clinical-documentation tool for behavioral-health providers: faster, higher-quality notes, with terminology suggestions tuned to behavioral health, and a clean path from a session to a signed note. It ships in three forms (a web app, a mobile app, and an installable desktop app), all sharing one writing experience.

The client, a US-based IT partner to behavioral-health providers, brought us in as product owner. We were in every stage (requirements, design, development and QA) across all three runtimes, on a deliberately tight timeline.

The brief

What the tool had to do

The goal was simple to state and hard to build: make clinical documentation fast, safe and available anywhere.

  • Speed up documentation with a fluid, low-friction note-taking experience.
  • Behavioral-health-aware suggestions for spelling, grammar and clinical terminology.
  • Capture notes & sessions offline, with no internet required in the room.
  • HIPAA-compliant protection of data at rest on the device.
  • Meaningful analytics in charts and dashboards, not raw tables.
  • Customizable reports to compile collective data on demand.
How we worked

Product ownership under a tight clock

Delivering a product this broad on a short timeline was as much a process problem as an engineering one.

We took the product-owner seat alongside the US team, joining user-feedback sessions, brainstorming features together, and turning ideas into shippable work. Our UI/UX designers ran a fast loop: mock up an idea, get user feedback, refine, hand to development. That tight loop, on top of a genuinely well-architected codebase, is what let a small team ship a broad product quickly.

Process change that paid off
We moved the team from Scrum to Kanban so work could flow continuously against a moving target, with fewer ceremony boundaries, faster feedback, and a steadier path to release under real time pressure.
The hard problem

One rich-text editor, on every surface

The writing experience is the product. It had to feel the same (and be the same) in a browser and in a native mobile app.

Rich-text editing is one of the hardest components in any product, and mobile platforms had no equivalent of the editor we had refined for the web. The conventional answer is to rebuild it natively for each platform, which fractures the experience, doubles the surface area for bugs, and means every improvement has to be built three times.

We took a different route: run the same editor everywhere, embedded inside the mobile app and connected to it through a carefully designed messaging layer, so the native app and the editor stay fully decoupled. One editor, with the same clinical writing features (smart expansions, drop-ins and inline suggestions), behaves identically on the web, on both mobile platforms, and on desktop.

Why it mattered
Every improvement to the writing experience lands once and ships everywhere. The editor never drifts between platforms, and clinicians never have to relearn their most-used tool when they switch devices.
Offline + security

Capture anywhere, protected without draining the battery

A session room can have no signal. The app had to capture everything locally, lock it down, and sync when a connection returned.

Clinicians can create sessions and write notes with no connectivity; the device syncs the moment it reconnects. On the device, the app sits behind biometric authentication and everything is encrypted at rest.

Encryption on a phone has a cost: protect too aggressively and the device runs hot and the battery drains. Drawing on what we learned building our earlier offline-first clinical app, we made protection frugal: instead of reprocessing everything a clinician types, the app protects only what has actually changed. Identical security guarantees, a fraction of the work, and a phone that stays cool and responsive through a full day of sessions.

The full product

A data-dense product that still feels light

Beyond the editor, the product carries the heavy, data-centric features clinicians and administrators rely on, across web, mobile and an installable desktop app that all draw from one codebase.

Rich note-taking

A fast clinical writing flow with expansions, drop-ins and behavioral-health-aware suggestions.

Individual & group notes

Capture notes per client or across a group session, from an appointment or a session.

Scribble to note

Hand-written scribble captured and imported straight into the note-writing process.

Bulk-sign

Sign many notes at once to save clinicians real time at the end of a day.

Dynamic questionnaires

Custom documents with dependent questions and rules, connected to the health record.

Analytics dashboards

Data turned into charts and dashboards leaders actually read, not raw tables.

Customizable reports

Pick parameters and generate reports tailored to what each user needs.

Granular permissions

A permission system that restricts access to specific patients and data.

EHR integration

Connections that move data cleanly between the tool and the systems of record.

Outcome

One editor, everywhere clinicians work

3

Runtimes from one product: web, mobile and desktop

1

Writing experience shared across every surface

0

Bars of signal needed to capture a session

offline-first
  • A fast, fluid note-taking experience, the same on the web, on mobile and on desktop.
  • Sessions and notes captured offline and synced on reconnect, protected at rest.
  • Data turned into dashboards and customizable reports, not raw tables.
  • A broad product delivered on a tight timeline through product ownership and a tight design loop.
Conclusion

Share the hard part, not just the easy parts

The temptation with “works everywhere” is to rebuild the experience per platform and watch them drift. We did the opposite: shared the single hardest component, the editor, across every runtime, and let each platform do only what it’s good at. The result is one product that feels consistent in a browser, in a clinician’s hand, and on a desktop, online or off.

Need one experience across web, mobile and desktop, without three codebases to keep in sync? That’s the kind of problem we like.

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