Covid-19 restrictions have forced many mental health practitioners to rapidly adopt telehealth as their primary delivery mechanism. Coviu has rapidly scaled from 450 calls per day pre-restrictions to a peak of 25,000 calls supporting over 60,000 clinicians Australia-wide with their telehealth needs. Over one third of Coviu users are mental health practitioners who we have been working closely with to co-design new features for the platform.

With 25% of all psychology sessions taking place with children and adolescents (Matthews et al. 2010), it is important to evaluate the benefits of telehealth and address its challenges when working with young people.

We have collected data from 33 discovery interviews and focus groups, user surveys, feedback channels and webinars to understand the benefits and challenges of using telehealth with children, young people and their families.

Mental health practitioners of Coviu platform have highlighted a number of benefits in using telehealth including: seeing children in the home environment, facilitating multidisciplinary meetings, enabling non-school attenders to access school-based counselling, reducing the amount of time taken out of school to attend therapy, providing easy access to parents of young people receiving care and enabling families to find a culturally appropriate professional.


We identified three major challenges that users are experiencing with telehealth in this population;

1. Children can become distracted by the buttons on the screen.
2. The lack of ability to administer common cognitive assessments.
3. Keeping children engaged during therapy.

To address these challenges Coviu has:

1. Implemented a “View only” option to prevent children from interacting with the interface.

2. Partnered with Pearson Clinical to integrate 30 psychological assessments including, WISC-V, WAIS-IV and WIAT-III.

2. Scoped games such as social detective games, creative games, and skill-specific games to maintain engagement and build rapport. These will be integrated into the platform in 2022.