Enhancing Service Coordination and Professional Practice: MaxApp for Responses to Violence Against Women

Interinstitutional coordination in responses to violence against women affects intervention quality and continuity and may increase secondary victimization. This article presents MaxApp, a web- and mobile-based prototype designed to support such coordination across services. The study adopted a qualitative tool-development design grounded in a participatory approach and comprised five phases: methodological planning, preliminary diagnosis, content development, tool design, and professional review. Two focus groups were conducted with 14 professionals from the social, healthcare, legal, and law-enforcement sectors in Pontevedra, Spain. The first identified coordination needs, barriers, and functional requirements; the second gathered professional appraisals of the tool’s structure, clarity, perceived usefulness, and suitability for practice following its development. Findings revealed fragmented access to information, duplicated interventions, repeated recounting of traumatic experiences, difficulties in case monitoring, and the need to protect data while enabling selective information sharing. These findings informed MaxApp’s design as a unified system for recording, monitoring, and sharing information among professionals. Participants considered that the tool could improve coordination, traceability, interdisciplinary communication, and documentation efficiency, while identifying areas requiring further refinement. As MaxApp remains a prototype, systematic usability testing and evaluation in real-world implementation settings are required to assess its functionality and practical impact in routine professional practice.