The Indigo Project: Australia’s First Trauma-Informed Therapist Matching System

The Indigo Project faced digital friction on two fronts. Externally, patients encountered a fragmented, inflexible system with no self-service control and a payment experience that discouraged return bookings - only 5% were booking future sessions alongside their initial appointment.Specialist ‘matchmakers’ manually paired every patient with a therapist - deeply considered, but entirely unscalable. It was difficult to triage enquiries, and high-risk enquiries were potentially waiting just as long as low-intent enquiries. The website converted 30% of enquiries - the opportunity to go further was being held back by process, not demand.

Phase One - a bespoke patient portal: a unified booking, payment, and records experience. Patients could manage bookings, upload Mental Health Treatment Plans for Medicare rebates, provide GP referrals, and pay via Stripe - all in one place. A prompt encouraging future bookings was a small intervention with outsized results.Phase Two - the only therapist-matching platform with a real-time risk assessment. Every enquiry is triaged from the first question; high-risk presentations escalate immediately to Indigo HQ or crisis lines. We distilled complex matching logic - therapy focus, personality, demographic tags, modality weightings - into the simplest possible journey for patients in distress.

The portal transformed how The Indigo Project's patients experience therapy as an ongoing practice. By removing booking friction, enabling payment automation, and giving patients ownership of their records, Nightjar changed the relationship between Indigo and its clients - from transactional to longitudinal.The Matchmaker extended that transformation to first contact: ensuring a person's decision to seek help is met with clarity and intelligence - connecting them with the right therapist faster, more securely, with less manual effort.Together, the two phases represent a complete reimagining of The Indigo Project's digital operations: from fragmented and manual, to unified, automated, and built for scale.

The patient portal introduced several features with significant clinical and commercial impact:- Mental Health Treatment Plan upload, enabling Medicare rebate eligibility - a critical factor in reducing the financial barrier to ongoing therapy- GP referral upload, linked to Medicare rebate processing- Stripe direct debit authority for first-time users, with automated future-session charging- Multi-session booking prompt at checkout - driving the 800% increase in repeat bookings- Secure patient data consolidated within Nookal via custom API integrationThe Indigo Matchmaker is powered by a composable ruleset, fully editable by the Indigo team in the Sanity CMS:- Practitioner profiles: specialties, personality tags, preferred clientele, availability, pricing, and their ‘therapy song’- Therapy categories and areas of support (Anxiety, Burnout, ADHD, Grief, Trauma, and more)- Per-practitioner modality weighting - e.g. Susan specialises in ADHD, but only for women aged 20+, with no co-occurring diagnosis- Immediate risk assessment and high-risk escalation workflow, routing sensitive cases directly to Indigo HQ and crisis hotlines where required- Klaviyo CRM journeys triggered post-match- Retool admin panel giving staff real-time visibility of all incoming enquiries- Australian-hosted data storage, ensuring patient health data never leaves Australian jurisdiction