Our Story

From an Observation to a Platform

Before founding Solacare, my team and I worked at Open Up for several years, supporting individuals and families through online counselling. I experienced first-hand how technology can lower the barriers to accessing mental health support, and how digital tools designed around counselling can reduce the burden on both counsellors and clients.

After moving to Canada, I continued working in counselling and mental health technology through my social work profession. I also gained a deeper understanding of the local private practice model and later established a psychotherapy centre, leading a team of social workers and psychologists in providing counselling services to the local community. In Canada, many counselling professionals provide services through private practice. Clients can choose a counsellor based on their needs, areas of expertise, language, background and communication style. Counselling professionals also have access to more established tools for managing appointments, sessions, forms, payments and clinical records.

This led me to consider what was missing in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has never lacked experienced and committed counselling professionals. What is often missing is a clear pathway for them to begin private practice, together with tools that genuinely fit local counselling workflows. From the client's perspective, there is also a lack of platforms that make it easy to compare, understand and connect with different counselling professionals while conveniently managing their appointments.

Redesigning Private Counselling for Hong Kong

This is how Solacare came into being. Drawing on frontline counselling experience in Hong Kong and the more established private practice model in Canada, we redesigned a reliable counselling system around Hong Kong's languages, culture, payment habits, service formats and real-world workflows.

For people seeking counselling, Solacare aims to show you more than a name and a fee. You can learn about each counselling professional's experience, therapeutic approach, communication style and service format, and then explore suitable options through AI-powered matching, the public professional directory or referral from a Solacare social worker.

For counselling professionals, Solacare brings the fragmented parts of private practice back into one platform: building a professional profile, receiving new clients, managing appointments, providing video, audio, text and in-person sessions, and handling forms, clinical records, notifications, payments and income management. This allows counsellors to spend more time on what truly matters: building an effective therapeutic relationship with their clients.

Clinical Practice and Technology Should Not Be Designed Separately

Solacare was not created by building a general business application and simply relabelling it as a counselling platform. Nor is it a basic system generated by AI. As a social worker, I understand the trust, boundaries, documentation, referrals and risks involved in every counselling session. With a master's degree in computer science, I am also able to translate these clinical needs into practical tools through system architecture, data security and user experience design.

Before building Solacare, I developed a volunteer counselling management system for Open Up. After moving to Canada, I also contributed to the development of the web systems supporting Canada's national 9-8-8 Suicide Crisis Helpline. These experiences helped me understand the technical and clinical considerations involved in bringing counselling into digital environments. Privacy, security, reliability and clinical usefulness have therefore been considered together from the earliest stages of design, rather than being added only after the platform was completed.

Designed by People and Continuously Improved by People

At the heart of counselling is the connection between people. Although Solacare is a technology platform, we do not want it to become a cold system where users can only submit forms and wait for automated replies.

The platform is still growing, and our team and I will personally seek to understand the difficulties experienced by counselling professionals and clients. A challenge you raise, an interaction that feels inconvenient, or even a comment such as something here does not feel quite right may become the starting point for our next improvement. People should not be required to adapt themselves to technology. Technology should be designed around the realities of counselling work.

Where We Hope to Go

We hope Solacare can help ensure that private counselling is no longer limited to the small number of people who already have established resources and professional networks. More experienced and committed counselling professionals should have the opportunity to begin providing services, while people in Hong Kong should have more choices and be able to find the right person to walk alongside them before their difficulties become overwhelming.

In the future, we will continue improving the platform's clinical and administrative tools. We will also carefully explore how AI can assist with repetitive work while protecting privacy, preserving professional judgement and respecting the therapeutic relationship, rather than replacing counselling professionals.

We do not expect one platform to solve every mental health challenge in Hong Kong. But if one more counsellor is able to take the first step towards private practice, or one more person is able to find the right support when they need it, Solacare will already have begun to fulfil the meaning behind its name.