South West trusts set to trial digital mental health innovation
Health and care providers in the South West are set to trial an innovative digital platform that has the potential to prevent relapse in patients with severe mental illness and support the shift of the NHS from analogue to digital.
The new smart phone-based platform, developed by CareLoop Health, offers predictive Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and uses an artificially intelligent algorithm to monitor symptoms in real-time to help predict and prevent relapse, reduce hospital admissions and provide early support in the community for people living with severe mental illnesses including psychosis, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
With support from Health Innovation South West, alongside funding from NHS England regional team and SBRI Healthcare, Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, Devon Partnership NHS Trust and LiveWell Southwest will trial the platform with mental health teams, aiming to recruit over 100 patients in a pilot.
Accident & Emergency (A&E) departments in Devon alone see around 27 visits a day from people living with a severe mental illness, which equates to approximately 10% of all A&E visits, and a significant cost to the NHS in the region.
CareLoop Health’s digital platform, which would be offered to patients living in rural and coastal regions like Devon and Cornwall, provides an early warning system to clinicians, enabling them to intervene to prevent patient deterioration and subsequent admission to hospital, therefore reducing pressure on emergency and acute services in these areas and NHS expenditure.
Rebecca Whitting, Executive Director of Innovation Implementation at Health Innovation South West, said: “In our South West rural and coastal communities, long travel times and high costs to access both primary and secondary care mean that many residents are left without specialist mental health services . Plus, 28% of people in the Peninsula and 51% in Cornwall & Isles of Scilly live over 20km from an Emergency Department, forcing greater reliance on crisis care. CareLoop’s technology provides real-time monitoring and support, improving both patient outcomes and healthcare efficiency.”
Health Innovation South West is working with CareLoop Health to support Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, Devon Partnership NHS Trust and LiveWell Southwest to implement the platform. “We benefit from [Health Innovation South West]’s local connections and in-depth knowledge as well as their extensive commercial experience and commissioning networks”, said Zoe Blake, CEO at CareLoop Health.
Positioned at the centre of the South West’s innovation ecosystem, we are working with partners on the ground like CareLoop Health to test and prepare solutions in health and social care for adoption at scale, that are adapted for our rural and coastal context. Our team of evaluation and insight specialists will play a key role in capturing learning from the CareLoop pilot, by measuring relapse prevention, hospital admissions and NHS cost savings, as well as uptake, adherence and experience of patients and clinicians using CareLoop. This learning will be shared regionally and nationally, to refine implementation and support the potential wider adoption of the platform into routine care in other rural and coastal places across the country.
Learn more about our work – explore our website.
For more information about our work with CareLoop Health please contact Simon Dallas, Programme Manager ([email protected]) or Lynnette Chapman, Evaluation and Learning Director ([email protected]).
Watch our new video with CEO and Co-founder of CareLoop Health, Zoe Blake, to find out how this digital innovation is making a real difference in mental health care.
