Our client partnership

The client partnership is a collaborative relationship between clients, users and Mentallys teams, thanks to an ongoing codesign process.
Inspired by the Patient Partner Model, Mentallys‘ client partnership (Client Partner Model) is a novel approach. It’s not just a commercial relationship, but a collaborative one, based on participation in the platform‘s ongoing codesign process.
When an organization becomes a Mentallys client, it pays a monthly subscription fee, enabling it to offer the platform to its users free of charge. But this organization also becomes a Mentallys partner, gaining the right to influence the evolution of the platform’s features.
We primarily serve public mental health services, post-secondary education institutions (e.g. universities) and community organizations (e.g. associations). However, professionals in private practice can also become client partners.
The aim of this partnership is to enable the client organization to adapt the platform as closely as possible to its own realities and those of its users, in contrast to generalist digital solutions that do not take into account the specific nature of mental health and the field in which they are intended to be implemented.
The partnership takes the form of codesign activities led by Mentallys teams and involving end-users of the platform, in line with our mission statement‘s values of empathy and creativity.



What is codesign? It’s the central approach that embodies the client partnership offered by Mentallys
Codesign is a collective creativity approach applied to the entire product design process, involving both design experts and non-trained-in-design people. In the case of Mentallys, the non-trained-in-design people are patient partners, peer support workers and healthcare professionals, while the design experts are design researchers, designers and design students.
Thanks to codesign, the Mentallys platform becomes a collective object of design shared by users and clients, who comment on the prototype as it is developed. The prototype continues to evolve thanks to a “social conversation” between participants in the process. Mentallys teams facilitate this creative conversation and translate its results into design and development recommendations.
The Mentallys platform was designed and developed following such a codesign process, as evidenced by several scientific publications, and it is in the same way that it will evolve and find its place in the healthcare system and society.
In 2022, Mentallys won UQAM Partnership Award, as part of the “De l’idée à l’innovation” competition, for the excellence of its codesign approach.
Reference
Vial, S., Boudhraâ, S., Dumont, M., Tremblay, M., Riendeau, S. (2023). Developing A Mobile App With a Human-Centered Design Lens to Improve Access to Mental Health Care (Mentallys Project): Protocol for an Initial Co-Design Process. JMIR Research Protocols, 2023;12:e47220. https://doi.org/10.2196/47220