Bath-based specialist software house Mayden has been awarded funding to help with the digital transformation of the way patients get access to mental health services.
The financial support from the Small Business Research Initiative for Healthcare – which supports tech innovation in the NHS – will enable Mayden to digitise and streamline each stage of the patient journey, from the point of referral to the start of treatment – including triage and assessment processes. 
The project aims to reduce waiting times and enable patients to organise their own appointments – improving the patient experience, reducing admin, enabling faster recovery and increasing the number of patients that can be seen.
Some 10% of the UK population is thought to be suffering from a mental health condition which would benefit from psychological therapy.
However, IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) services have the capacity to meet less than a fifth of that demand.
And for every 1,000 patients referred to IAPT, half complete a course of treatment with around 250 reaching recovery.
By standardising assessment processes – in combination with clinical input, historical data analysis and treatment guidelines from NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) – the project also aims to generate personalised treatment insights using data-driven technologies.
Therapists will be signposted to treatment options that have been effective for patients with similar profiles and can consider those options with the patient.
Mayden, which specialises in innovative, flexible cloud-based software for the healthcare sector, is exploring the use of predictive modelling to identify whether it is possible to predict patterns of patient engagement. If this is found to be the case, modules could be built to suggest actions that clinicians can take to engage those patients that are at risk of dropping out, such as direct messaging.
Mayden has developed iaptus, the market-leading psychological therapy patient management system which is trusted by 70% of England’s Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services.
Mayden has produced a prototype machine learning algorithm as a result of its work in the first phase of this project.
The work has generated national clinical interest in standardising the assessment process.
Mayden founder and managing director Chris May said: “We’re really excited about this project as it has the potential to transform how patients receive treatment that gives them the best chance of recovery.
“The NHS long-term plan has committed to expanding IAPT provision from around 1m patients in 2018 to almost 2m seen each year by 2024.
“To achieve this efficiently, system-level change is required. We have a remarkable opportunity to work closely with clinicians to bring about a complete digital transformation of the referral to treatment pathway, leading to improved outcomes for patients.”
