Software for perinatal psychologists: your practice from pregnancy to postpartum

Week 34. The patient texts at quarter to eight: her monitoring appointment has been moved forward and she won't make the ten o'clock session. Two months later she's back, this time with the baby asleep in a sling and forty minutes before the next feed. Anyone who works in perinatal psychology knows the rhythm: appointments that shift with every scan, a birth that ignores the calendar and a postpartum period in which getting to the practice at all is an achievement. Software for perinatal psychologists doesn't need to work miracles. It needs to absorb all that back-and-forth without anything slipping through.

Demand is not small. According to the World Health Organization, about 10% of pregnant women and 13% of women who have just given birth experience a mental disorder, mainly depression. Behind those figures there are full diaries, records with dates that matter and messages at odd hours. This guide covers what a perinatal psychology practice really needs from its management software, with concrete examples and a checklist to help you choose. The clinical side (postnatal depression, perinatal anxiety, screening with the EPDS) is in our guide to perinatal and postpartum psychology.

What software for perinatal psychologists needs (and what it can do without)

Software for perinatal psychologists is, at heart, practice management software like any other: scheduling, patient records, clinical notes and billing. What changes is which parts get pushed to the limit. In a perinatal practice, five of them do almost all the work:

• A flexible diary, because cancellations come from medical check-ups, bed rest or an early birth, and you have to reschedule without losing continuity.
• A record that asks what you ask: due date, weeks of pregnancy, who referred her, whether there were previous losses.
• Follow-up over time, with session notes and screening repeated over months, sometimes more than a year.
• Consent and communication with little friction, often involving the partner too.
• Serious data protection, because few things are as private as a pregnancy, a loss or postnatal depression.

What it can do without usually points the other way: modules you will never open, settings designed for a hospital and prices calculated for clinics with twenty clinicians. If you work alone or with one colleague, what you need is for the basics to work very well.

A perinatal psychology diary that copes with pregnancy and the postpartum period

The diary is where the specialty shows most. During pregnancy, the patient has her own medical calendar (blood tests, scans, monitoring) and your appointment competes with all of it. After the birth, the baby sets the timetable. With a rigid diary, every change turns into three messages and a crossing-out.

What works is making it take a single tap to move an appointment, and letting the patient do part of the work without calling you. In My Psico Agenda, for example, each patient has her own portal where she sees her upcoming sessions, books free slots and asks to cancel or change an appointment. You approve it from your inbox. The slots she is offered come from your working hours, and if you block a morning for training or personal matters, that time disappears from what she sees.

Last-minute cancellations in perinatal psychology, without punishing anyone

In perinatal psychology many practices relax their cancellation policy in the third trimester and in the first weeks after the birth. It makes clinical sense: penalising a woman for going to an urgent check-up does nothing for the therapeutic alliance. Still, flexibility without order eats up your week. Three things help:

• A WhatsApp reminder 24 hours before, with buttons to confirm or cancel that open a conversation with you. You find out the day before, not ten minutes before.
• The cancelled slot showing up as free again in the portal, so another patient can book it.
• Being able to turn off reminders for one specific patient when she asks, or when it isn't a good time to receive messages.

The perinatal patient record: the details generic software never asks for

The standard record in almost any program has name, ID number, phone, email and little else. In a perinatal psychology practice that falls short. What actually guides the work is other information, and if the software has no place for it, it ends up on a sticky note or in the margin of a notebook.

That is why you should expect software for perinatal psychologists to have an expandable record. In My Psico Agenda you do it from Settings › General › "Additional fields in patient records": you create the field, name it and choose how it is answered. These are some that make sense in perinatal work:

• Due date, as a date field.
• Weeks of pregnancy at the first visit, as a number.
• First pregnancy? and Previous pregnancy losses?, as yes or no.
• Type of birth (vaginal, assisted, caesarean) and feeding (breast, mixed, formula), as drop-down lists.
• Referred by: midwife, obstetrics, GP or another patient.
• Support network, as long text.

The fields appear in the "Additional data" section of all your records, old and new. You can reorder, rename or remove them, and if a patient already has that field filled in, the app warns you first. When a detail is essential, you mark it as required and the record won't save without it.

The due date and other key dates in perinatal psychology

The due date shapes the treatment plan: how many sessions fit before the birth, when to pause, when to resume and in what format. Other dates carry the same clinical weight. In perinatal grief, the day the baby would have been born or the anniversary of the loss often brings the pain back, and having those dates in view lets you prepare. Saving them as date fields in the record is more reliable than trusting your memory on an ordinary Tuesday.

Follow-up in perinatal psychology: screening, notes and progress in one place

Perinatal work is longitudinal. A patient may start in the second trimester and continue until the baby turns one. The NICE CG192 guideline on antenatal and postnatal mental health recommends agreeing how symptoms will be monitored, for example with validated questionnaires such as the EPDS, the PHQ-9 or the GAD-7, and doing so regularly through pregnancy and the postnatal period, particularly in the first few weeks after childbirth.

For that monitoring to be useful, the scores and notes have to live where the diary lives. In practice:

• Each patient's clinical record holds the session notes, including each screening score with its date.
• If you want the baseline visible at a glance, create number fields such as "Baseline EPDS" and "Postnatal EPDS" in the record.
• The patient's files (the midwife's report, a scanned questionnaire) are uploaded to her record, up to 25 MB per file.
• Each patient's statistics show how many sessions she has had, her attendance rate, how often she comes and when her last visit was. A cadence that suddenly stretches after the birth says a lot.

When another professional asks for the record on paper, you download it as a PDF and choose which details go in. If you tick "Include Therapies", the document adds a table of completed sessions: date, time, duration and type of therapy.

Online perinatal psychology sessions in the postpartum period

In the first weeks after the birth, leaving the house with a newborn for a fifty-minute session can be impossible. Many perinatal psychologists combine in-person and online work, or see women online only in the early postpartum weeks. It helps to be clear about what each tool does: you run the video call on whatever platform you already use, and the software for perinatal psychologists handles everything else, from the appointment and the reminder to the session note and the invoice. That way you don't have half your practice in one program and the other half in your email.

Perinatal psychology sessions with the baby in the room

Two practical details that are welcome at this stage: booking slightly longer appointments when the mother comes with the baby (a feed or a nappy change mid-session is normal) and noting in the record the time of day when the baby usually naps, which is when sessions go best.

The partner in the perinatal practice: joint sessions, records and consent

A new baby changes the whole family, and in perinatal psychology it is common for the partner to join a session or start their own process. From an admin point of view, decide from the start how you will record it:

• If the partner occasionally attends the patient's sessions, you note it in her clinical record.
• If they start their own therapy, open a separate record with its own clinical notes and informed consent. Mixing two people in one record complicates confidentiality and any data access request.

Consent can be signed in the session, on a tablet or phone, or remotely through a link the patient opens on her own phone. For a woman on bed rest or with a newborn in her arms, signing from home saves a trip. If you often work with couples and families, the guide to software for couples and family therapists has more ideas for organising these cases.

Perinatal grief: when admin needs to be caring too

Few situations call for as much tact as a pregnancy loss or a neonatal death. In these processes the admin details weigh more than they seem to: an automatic message on a bad day or a forgotten date can hurt without anyone meaning it. Some guidelines that work:

• Ask how she prefers to be contacted and, if she asks, turn off automatic reminders for her alone. The rest of your diary stays the same.
• Save the sensitive dates (the date of the loss, the date the baby would have been born) as date fields in her record, so you can prepare before they arrive.
• Protect your diary in those weeks: unhurried sessions, with no other appointment straight afterwards.

We cover the clinical approach in our guide to grief therapy.

Data protection in a perinatal practice: pregnancy, loss and mental health

A pregnancy, a termination, a loss or a diagnosis of postnatal depression are health data, and the GDPR lists them among the special categories of personal data (Article 9) that require extra protection. Translated into what you should ask of your software:

• A signed data processing agreement with the provider.
• Encryption in transit and at rest, and daily backups that are also encrypted.
• Servers in the European Union, with no transfers outside the European Economic Area.
• Two-step verification and control over devices with an open session.

My Psico Agenda ticks that list: servers in the EU, a database encrypted on disk, encrypted daily backups, two-step verification, a PIN for sensitive sections and a data processing agreement available to you.

Session packs, invoices and payments in a perinatal psychology practice

Many perinatal psychologists work with fixed programmes: an eight-session pregnancy support programme, a postpartum package, a grief process. Selling them as session packs has two advantages: the patient knows from the start what is included, and you don't chase payments session by session. The pack counts sessions down by itself and the patient can see in her portal how many she has left.

Invoicing is VeriFactu-ready and every invoice is linked to its patient. If a company pays for the treatment, the record has a "Bill a Company" switch so the invoice is issued in the company's name.

Software for perinatal psychology teams and practices

When several clinicians work together, whether a perinatal unit inside a practice or a specialist centre, admin changes scale. My Psico Agenda's practice plans bring together every therapist's diary and the rooms, with commission splits and practice invoicing. Each therapist keeps her own record fields, and the practice manager sees that same data in each therapist's records in real time, with nothing copied by hand.

How to choose software for perinatal psychologists: checklist

Before you decide, test the software with a made-up but realistic case and answer these questions:

1. Can I add the due date, weeks of pregnancy and referral source to the record without asking support?
2. Can I mark the details I don't want to miss as required?
3. Can the patient book, change or cancel appointments without calling me?
4. Are reminders sent by WhatsApp, and can I turn them off for one patient?
5. Can informed consent be signed remotely?
6. Are the clinical record, files and screening in the same place as the diary?
7. Can I export the record as a PDF when another professional asks for it?
8. Is there a data processing agreement, encryption and EU hosting?
9. Can I try it free, without a card and without a contract?

For a broader look at this kind of tool, the guide to patient management software for psychologists has its own checklist.

My Psico Agenda as software for perinatal psychologists

My Psico Agenda isn't a program built only for perinatal work, and we won't sell it to you as one. It is software for psychologists that fits a perinatal practice thanks to its configurable records, the diary with a patient portal and WhatsApp reminders. In short:

• A diary in the browser and on your phone, with working hours, blocked time and a patient portal to book, change or cancel appointments.
• Records with your own fields in seven types (short or long text, number, date, yes/no, list and multiple choice), required if you want, plus PDF export.
• Clinical records, files and per-patient statistics.
• WhatsApp reminders 24 hours before, with buttons to confirm or cancel.
• Editable informed consent, signed in session or by link.
• Session packs and VeriFactu-ready invoicing.

The Semilla plan costs €4.99/month + VAT and includes up to 25 patients, 20 automatic reminders and 20 VeriFactu invoices a month. Júnior (€19.99) and Sénior (€29.99) remove the patient limit and add more reminders, invoices and storage; the details are on the pricing page. The first month is free, with no card and no contract.