Most of the work of looking after someone happens between appointments, and almost none of it is visible.
A psychologist sees a client on Tuesday. The next session is a fortnight away. In the days between, the client may be fine, or they may be in the kind of week where getting out of bed is the whole day's work. The clinician usually finds out on the following Tuesday, if the client comes. If they do not come, the practice sends a reminder, then a letter, and by then a month has passed.
This piece is about that silence, and about something we are building to sit inside it. It is not a finished feature, and we are not pretending it is. It is a direction, and we would rather test it against the people who would actually use it than launch it and hope.
What Y.O.D.O. does today
Y.O.D.O. is a private communication support service. An Account Holder chooses a Check-In rhythm. At each Check-In they confirm they are OK with one tap. If a Check-In is missed beyond the buffer they set, the trusted people they named, their Delegates, are gently notified in stages. Separately, they can leave Sealed Messages that are released only after a passing has been formally verified.
Professionals already have a place in this. A solicitor, notary, funeral director or adviser can be named as a Special Delegate: a trusted contact who is told when it matters, with a free directory listing and nothing to manage in between. The role is free, and there is no obligation to act.
What we want to add, and why
The Special Delegate role was designed around a passing. Healthcare is different. For a therapist, a psychiatrist, a community mental health nurse or a GP, the moment that matters is usually earlier and quieter than that. It is the fortnight of no contact. It is the client who stops answering and later says they did not want to be a bother.
So we are working on two things for healthcare professionals.
The first is straightforward: healthcare professionals will be able to be named as Special Delegates, in the same way solicitors and funeral directors can today.
The second is the part we want to discuss. Where the Account Holder chooses to enable it, a named healthcare professional could also be notified as an ordinary Delegate is notified, meaning they would receive the quiet signal when Check-Ins go unanswered. Off by default. Client-controlled. Revocable at any moment, without a conversation.
Alongside this we are developing Passive Check-in for Supreme subscribers, which is also not yet available. With the Account Holder's opt-in, step-count data from the companion app can quietly supplement Scheduled Check-Ins, so a long stretch without movement prompts a gentle nudge before anything else happens. It never shares numbers. It answers one question: has there been movement in this window. No location, no heart rate, no sleep, no health records, and no step figures are ever shown to anyone. The point is wellbeing, mental as much as physical. A day or more of stillness can mean a hard patch just as easily as a fall. Passive Check-in never guesses which. It simply asks a trusted person to look in.
What the signal is, and firmly what it is not
It is a nudge, not a diagnosis. It says only that someone did not confirm they were OK, or that a quiet window has passed. It carries no clinical content, no numbers, no location and no interpretation.
It is not an alerting or escalation system. Y.O.D.O. does not contact emergency services, does not dispatch anyone, and is not a medical device or a crisis line. Nothing in it replaces a safety plan or a risk assessment.
It creates no duty. A notified professional may act, may note it, or may do nothing at all. The service does not track whether they responded, and does not report back to the client that they did or did not.
It is consent-first. The client names the professional, switches the notification on, and can switch it off at any time without explanation.
The open question
Here is where we need clinicians rather than product thinking, because we can see the argument on both sides.
In favour: a small, low-noise signal that a client has gone quiet is information that clinical practice currently has no cheap way of getting. It can prompt the phone call that would otherwise have waited until the next appointment.
Against: a signal you receive is a signal you now know about. Even without a legal duty, knowing changes how a professional feels about the fortnight of silence. There is a real risk of alert fatigue in a caseload of eighty, of ambiguity about what a non-response means, of an expectation forming in the client's mind that someone is watching, and of indemnity and record-keeping questions that we cannot answer on a clinician's behalf.
So we are asking directly.
Would you accept this notification if a client asked you to? Under what conditions would you decline it outright? Would it need to sit inside a written agreement with the client before you would consider it? Would you want it to reach an individual clinician, a duty inbox or a practice manager? What frequency would be tolerable across a full caseload, and at what point would it become noise you would mute? Is there a form of words that would let a client offer this without implying a promise you have not made? And is there a category of client for whom you would say no on principle, however the wording is framed?
If your answer is that this should not exist in clinical practice at all, we would like to hear that too, and why. It is the kind of answer that changes a roadmap.
How to reply
Write to info@yodo.ltd with "Quiet signal" in the subject line, or contact us through https://yodo.ltd/contact/. Tell us your discipline and setting, private practice, NHS, third sector, and be as blunt as you like. We will not publish your name or any identifying detail without asking you first, and we are not collecting this to build a marketing list.
If you would rather see the professional side of the service as it stands today, that is at https://yodo.ltd/partners/. Being listed there is free, now and in the future, and involves no obligation.
We would rather get this right slowly than get it live quickly. Silence between appointments is where a lot of harm hides. It is also where a lot of privacy lives, and those two things pull in opposite directions. That tension is exactly what we are asking you to help us resolve.