Michele Lawrence  0:01  
You're listening to this is yoga therapy. I'm your host, Michele Lawrence. And I've had the opportunity to interview many of those who are making a difference at the intersections of yoga and health. And I'm here to share with you their stories and conversations. Thanks for listening. In today's episode, I had the opportunity to interview Jenny Williams. Jenny is a certified yoga therapist and an Australian registered nurse who started practicing yoga when she was 16 years old. She pursued a corporate career in health care, which took her from Asia to Africa, from South America, to Russia, Mongolia and to Papua New Guinea. And now calls Bali home. Jenny conceived the idea of ZMAAYA, a software platform for yoga therapists and other holistic practitioners, partly out of necessity, but mostly to support the evolving professional practice of yoga therapists. It's great to have you here today, Jenny. 

Thanks, Michelle. I'm really pleased to be here. 

Can you start by sharing with our listeners a bit more about yourself? I obviously shared your bio. But tell us a little bit more about you and why you decided to create a software platform.

Jenny Williams  1:18  
Yeah, sure. I'm a registered nurse from Australia but haven't lived in Australia for about 22 years, I pursued a career overseas outside of Australia with a company that was developing clinics in very remote region. I've traveled all over the world, as you said, from Mongolia, to Papua New Guinea into Russia and the route of the former Russian States and Africa and worked developing clinics and doing a lot of training with local staff and capacity building and quality audits and so forth and so on. So I sort of traveling all over the world for many years, and also managed a clinic here in Bali, and assisted in opening a 350 bed hospital here in Bali as well worked for a big hospital chain here for a while. So yeah, I've always practiced yoga, but as sort of probably lost it a little bit in my 30s came back to it in my 40s, I was heavily involved in the first Bali terrorist attack, and the second one as well. And after that, I think I had a little bit of post traumatic stress disorder and started doing some meditation, got back into yoga, went off to India and became a yoga teacher and then realized that in my late 40s, I probably wasn't the right person to stand in a class of 20 year olds teaching yoga, and realized that yoga therapy actually was my thing, especially given my background. So yeah, so pursued with a lovely group in Hong Kong, wisdom yoga and did yoga therapy training and became a yoga therapist was in one of the first grandparenting groups through IAYT. Now, I still work a little bit, I haven't do a few things. So I still work a little bit in healthcare. I'm currently doing some consulting with a company, a startup company that's providing elearning platforms to nurses and allied healthcare workers in developing countries. So that's really interesting, and do a bit of work with a company that provides medics in the offshore industry. So I helped support them a little bit. But I also say yoga therapy clients as well. So I have a couple of clients I see every week. So I do about five or six sessions of yoga therapy a week. So I'm doing a few different things. But I sort of like that it's on my own terms and balanced. And then I have some private clients as well. So as my came out of the idea that when I finished my yoga therapy training, so like, do we have to write paper notes? Like, what's that about? Having worked in healthcare for many years, using electronic medical records? So I saw Wow, where am I going to store all of these bits of paper? How am I going to keep the information safe and private? So I sort of thought, you know, a software I started looking for software couldn't find anything that was sort of suitable for one therapist, there was lots of clinic systems, but not a lot of single therapists system, sort of thought, How hard could it be to develop a software and pitch the idea to a friend of mine here who's a yoga teacher, but she's a software architect and spent 20 years in Silicon Valley, and got out of her corporate life to come here and teach yoga in Bali. And yeah, she really liked the idea. And yeah, we formed the company, ZMAAYA, and I think within 24 hours, we had a team in India ready to start development and that was the end of 2000 Then 16. So it's an interesting journey. and developing software is something that I never expected but quite iterative and lots of changes. But yeah, I think the software is something very different now to what we launched. And certainly we've listened to what people want. And we've been able to react and make changes to the software. I think we're sort of we've hit the mark, where we're at at the moment.

Michele Lawrence  5:26  
Yeah, that's great. And I guess that it sounds like the solution arose based upon the problem that you saw, which was there's not a system specifically for yoga therapists to keep track of all their client notes and records. Would you say that that is the problem, at least initially, that ZMAAYA solves? Or perhaps it's evolved a bit since then?

Jenny Williams   5:51  
I think there's probably a few things, but mostly is to get people organized around documentation. So you have all of this client documentation that you're collecting, which is private needs to be secure. It's confidential information. What are you doing with that? And how are you keeping that safe? From a compliance point of view, I know that everyone rolls their eyes at that compliance, but at the end of the day, you've got a responsibility to keep that information safe. And so we've developed a platform that, you know, it's a good practice template, this is a way of keeping that information safe and secure.

Michele Lawrence  6:30  
And so what does make ZMAAYA different from other client management applications, because I'm sure there's lots of different options out there, but maybe not specifically to what the yoga therapist does. So I'm assuming that's one of the unique differentiators other things that you could share with us that makes z Maya different

Jenny Williams   6:49  
Sure. Effectively, we develop this software for my practice, really, for a yoga therapist. So there is no other software, as far as I know, that is has been developed specifically for yoga therapists. So that's a differentiating factor, I suppose. And the other thing is that many of the software's that are available on the market for clinics, so therefore, multiple users, they have functionality that probably requires multiple people using it. So for instance, if you're working in a clinic, you would have a receptionist, you would probably have a back office person doing your billing, you would probably have multiple therapists within the clinic. So there are software's for that. It's quite large, it's scalable. But for a yoga therapist or a therapist just starting out, they probably don't need all of that functionality. So we've built some IR for independent users. So you can have your own practice, single user. And I think that's a differentiating factor. And from a cost point of view. It's quite cost effective.

Michele Lawrence  8:02  
Yeah, that makes sense. And I mean, that's what we're typically seeing yoga therapists doing right in the world working in private practice, and not necessarily working on a large team. Although I imagine the features that z Maya contains the confidentiality, the way in which you organize the records can play well into a clinical practice, right, from a sort of client sharing perspective. Of course, you need permission in all to do that sharing records. But because you have the background in nursing, as well as being a yoga therapist, it sounds like you probably understand what's important to keep track of whether you're in a clinic or not. Absolutely.

Jenny Williams   8:47  
So when we built some I was very clear that we were building based on those premises, confidentiality, privacy, security of the information. So we utilize HIPAA as a base for that. And so our compliances are all there, you know, the login, password protected two factor authentication encrypted in the back end, the intake form that's developed is only sent as a link to our server. So now information is sent over email. So there are lots of confidentiality and privacy compliances there. If you have to do that in a paper record. Think about if those of you who are using paper records at the moment, where are your paper records stored? How are you sending your intake form to your client? If you're a school, you've got students under mentorship. How are you sending client records for mentorship review? So how are you sending those records are you redacting people's names, but still the information is there, you're sending it over email. I how time consuming is that and we've also developed a system in ZMAAYA where schools can actually mentor can access a student's ZMAAYA file, obviously, with consent of a client, so that they can review a file real time in ZMAAYA. So the student develops their assessment and their soap notes and management plans into Maya, a mentor can actually log in and review that file, not editable. So the mentor cannot edit that, but at least they can see what the students doing and say their development of their problem solving, I suppose. Yeah, that's great.

Michele Lawrence   10:31  
I can see us moving in that direction eventually. Yeah, cuz it's so useful and helpful. All the things, obviously, that you mentioned are things that we do. And we have a variety of different methods for doing them, but this streamlines everything. And what is it that users love most about ZMAAYA?

Jenny Williams   10:50  
I'd like to say everything, but I think the intake forms, so developing your own intake form, so it's a bit of a drag and drop sort of or select from our library of questions, you can develop your own intake form, and the intake form is sent to the client via a link. So there's that security and confidentiality issues covered there. I think the assessment part of Samira so in the client dashboard, where you can see your client file and develop an assessment based on physical assessment based on the Ayurvedic assessment, based on like other clinical assessment protocols, you can review your intake form before the client comes to see you. And then the management plan section. I think that's really robust. Again, that sort of a drag and drop. But to be able to upload your own video or pictures into your management plan, and decide what content you want in your management plan, I think they can develop really robust management plans for your clients. So I think they're the things that I love. And I think they're the things that our clients love as well.

Michele Lawrence 12:01  
Mm hmm. So some of those that you mentioned, is there a favorite feature that you have? It sounds to me like the video archive or library and the photos that you can share with your clients, as part of the management plan is a really cool feature? Is that what you liked the best? Or is there something else that you like the best personally,

Jenny Williams   12:19  
for me, the whole thing is great, because it means I open it up, I write my notes, I can develop my management plans. And it's all in one place. That's what I love about it is that I know that it's not bits of paper all over my desk, or in filing cabinets or in books, it's all in one place. And I can see my client information all in one place. So from a clinical problem solving point of view, if I want to develop the best plan for a client, I need to be able to see all of my information in one place. And that's what I love about it is I can see all of the client information in one place. And then I can develop a really robust plan for the client.

Michele Lawrence  13:00  
Yeah, that's great. And so you've been doing this for a little while now. It's probably what five years? I think, yeah. Coming on five years. Yeah. And so tell us what the future holds for ZMAAYA? Like, do you see just more adoption by yoga therapists? Do you see your solution growing based on how the field and the attraction of the profession continues to grow? Are there partnerships or alliances and your future? I'm curious, and some things you might need to keep under wraps, obviously, but what's the next step for you all.

Jenny Williams  13:32  
So we have a few things on our roadmap, obviously, schools, yoga therapy, schools, and sharing files is something that we really wanted to develop and have partnerships with schools on that. So that's one thing. And we've been approached by a couple of yoga therapists who are interested in developing clinics. So we're looking at how we open up this software for that clinic system style of ZMAAYA. So that's one thing, probably the most exciting thing that's coming up in the next month or so is our lite version, a mobile version, so people will be able to access the Maya, on their mobile phones. So we've created a really cool mobile app. That's great. And the next part to that is to develop a client login. So to be able to have your client log in to their profile of Somalia, and see their intake form their outcome measures and their management plan, and be able to measure their outcomes between sessions. So for a yoga therapist, that's really nice, because you'll be able to see what happens between sessions, you'll be able to reinforce the homework that you're sending home with clients, and you'll be able to get that feedback. So to me, that's pretty exciting. And we're just working on that at the moment. They'll also be some other features around But we're working on that at the moment. Yeah. So I think there's probably one other thing that I'm just in talks with another yoga therapist, we're looking at how we can use some Maya to do some research for data collection. So we're just coming up with a research topic, we're just throwing that around at the moment and seeing if we can get some funding for research, we're thinking that post COVID might be a good option. And there might be some funding around that, but to use ZMAAYA, as the data collection software, and if we could get multiple yoga therapists, using the software to collect data on a research project, I think would also be pretty cool.

Michele Lawrence  15:47  
Yeah, all that sounds amazing. I love the client app. That's huge. Because we know as yoga therapists, the yoga therapy is only as effective as the client is doing it. And oftentimes, there's just not a good view into what the progress is. And so that you're tying it together, I think is fantastic. And I love the research piece to these all sound really exciting. And good luck with all that, and I look forward to seeing that rolled out.

Jenny Williams   16:16  
Yeah, we're pretty excited. The research part has always been on my horizon. But it was also one of the reasons that I developed some, I think big data, we already know that yoga therapy works, right. So that to me, is inherent. But to get that message out, you need that body of research. And I think there's a huge body of research already. But imagine if 5000 or 7000, yoga therapists were focused, we could collect data from that many yoga therapists focused on one particular aspect of yoga therapy, and then have the data to back that up would be pretty cool, right?

Michele Lawrence  16:56  
Yeah, fabulous. Well, great, yeah, exciting things. And I encourage everybody to check out ZMAAYA, and I will continue to encourage our students to do it too. Because I just want to see everybody being able to take advantage of all the benefits that having something like this can bring to your practice. And so finally, I like to ask this question to each of our guests in our training programs at inner peace yoga therapy, we teach our students who are studying to become yoga therapists that one of the key pillars to doing the work is to first have your own steady daily sadhana. And this sets the foundation and comes before holding space and doing any work with others. So I'm curious, you wear a lot of different hats. You're a software person, your yoga therapists, your nurse, and I'm sure you also have a daily practice. So can you tell us what it looks like?

Jenny Williams  17:51  
Sure, I sometimes consistent sometimes not consistent, because work gets in the way. But I also gave up beating myself up on that as well. So when I have time, I like to focus on making sure that I move every day. So I practice Ashtanga Yoga, which is fairly you know, it's heat generating. I like that, I would say five days a week, in the afternoon. I have an Ashtanga practice. So that's one three days a week I go down to the beach in the mornings, watch the sunrise and do some soft sand walking, which is pretty cool. So it's like earthing or right by by a couple of times a week. So yeah, I think I have a consistent practice where I take time for myself. I think that's my sadhana.

Michele Lawrence  18:44  
Yeah, I love the beach walking in the sand. Sounds really nice to me right now. Well, thank you so much for talking with me today, Jenny, I am so excited that you do what you do. And I really appreciate it and I look forward to see and more to come from you and your team. And for those who are listening. You can learn more about Jenny and ZMAAYA at ZMAAYA.com. Thanks so much. 

Thanks, Michelle. Great to speak to you. 

If you'd like to learn more about who we are and what we do, visit us at innerpeaceyogatherapy.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai