As part of Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust’s wider programme of AI and digital transformation, this case study on redesigning the mental health front door examines how Psyomics’ beseen platform is helping to redesign the “front door” to mental health services. Featured within Curia’s From Insight to Action report, the case study reflects the work undertaken through EPUT’s Digital Conference and patient-led sprint sessions, which explored how digital tools, better data and service redesign could support earlier intervention, reduce administrative burden and create more joined-up care.

Psyomics provides a practical example of how structured digital assessment can improve triage, give clinicians richer information earlier and reduce the need for patients to repeatedly explain their circumstances, while also highlighting the challenges of moving innovation beyond pilots and into routine NHS practice.

This article was sponsored by UK Healthcare and Life Sciences Innovation (UKHLSI) member Psyomics.

To find out more about Psyomics, visit: www.psyomics.com

Mental health services face a familiar challenge: people often enter the system through overstretched access points, with inconsistent referral information, repeated assessments, and significant administrative pressure on clinicians. Psyomics’ beseen platform offers one example of how digital technology can support a more structured, patient-informed and data-driven approach at the start of the care pathway.

beseen is a platform built with clinicians and users to capture rich biopsychosocial information directly from patients and generate structured reports to support clinical productivity. It is designed to sit at the “front door” of mental health services, supporting intake, triage and assessment by helping clinicians understand a person’s needs earlier and more consistently. The NHS Innovation Accelerator describes the platform as a digital tool for adult secondary care community mental health services, using a biopsychosocial model to capture self-reported information in a structured way to inform assessment, level of need and symptom profile.

The platform aligns closely with the key theme of Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust’s digital conference – moving from reactive to proactive care. Rather than waiting until a full clinical assessment to gather a more complete picture, beseen enables patients to share information in advance about what they are experiencing, why they are seeking help and the wider circumstances affecting their mental health. Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust has called it as a secure online questionnaire offered to adults referred to Neighbourhood Mental Health Teams, enabling people to explain their situation in their own words before assessment.

This is particularly important in mental health, where context matters. Symptoms alone rarely tell the whole story. Social circumstances, personal history, risk, functioning and patient priorities all shape the right response. By turning this information into a structured report, the platform can support more informed triage and reduce the need for patients to repeat their story multiple times across different professionals or services.

Psyomics also demonstrates the importance of reducing administrative burden. Mental health clinicians spend significant time gathering, processing and documenting information before care decisions can be made. Digital assessment tools can help standardise information capture and make it easier for clinicians to review patient-reported information before appointments. For services facing high demand, this has the potential to improve flow, support consistency and free up more time for direct clinical work.

Overcoming adoption challenge by redesigning the mental health front door

Dr Melinda Rees, Chief Executive of Psyomics, highlighted the wider adoption challenge during EPUT’s Digital Conference. She explained that Psyomics had calculated it needed more than 200 conversational touchpoints with an NHS mental health trust before procurement was seriously considered. She also said the platform is deployed at single points of access to mental health trusts, covering eight million adult lives, with an all-age backbone and newer children’s, neurodevelopmental and addictions versions.

Her comments underline a crucial lesson for digital mental health adoption: technology alone is not enough. Psyomics’ approach challenges short-term pilot culture. As Dr Rees put it, “We do not do pilots. We only do longer-term contracts.” Her argument was that clinician behaviour change, workflow redesign, patient engagement and measurable return on investment take time. A short pilot may show whether a tool functions, but it may not show whether it can become part of routine practice.

The platform also supports the theme of integrated, data-driven care. North London NHS Foundation Trust has described its partnership with Psyomics as a way to improve how residents access mental healthcare, with the platform capturing patient-reported information on symptoms, social and personal circumstances to inform the most appropriate care pathway. Sussex Partnership also notes that submitted reports can be accessed by staff through a secure link from the electronic patient record, helping connect patient input with existing clinical systems.

Patient experience is central to the case study. Digital assessment can give people more control over how and when they share information, including outside traditional appointment times. It can also support a more personalised first interaction with services, because clinicians begin with a clearer understanding of what matters to the patient.

Wider lessons

The wider lesson from Psyomics’ experiences in delivery is that successful digital transformation depends on implementation. Dr Rees described how Psyomics monitors patient and clinician engagement, identifies barriers to use and iterates the product using both qualitative and quantitative evaluation. Even small design changes, such as changing the colour of a widget, can affect engagement.

Psyomics therefore offers more than a case study in digital assessment. It shows how mental health services can redesign the front door around structured patient input, clinical productivity and longer-term adoption. Its experience also highlights what the NHS must get right: clear pathways, early procurement engagement, evidence generation, staff confidence and enough implementation time for technology to change practice.

Dr Melinda Rees

CEO, Psyomics

Delivering the NHS’s 10 Year Health Plan for mental health will depend on scalable collaboration and clinically grounded digital assessment tools like Psyomics’ beseen^TM, which helps capture patient need once, early, and consistently so clinicians can act faster and focus time where it matters most.

Partner content: Psyomics is a member of the Curia, Health, Care, and Life Sciences Research Group.

The NHS’s 10 Year Health Plan for England promises better access and prevention in mental health. However, delivering it will depend on new models of collaboration and technology like Psyomics’ digital assessment platform, beseen^TM, which brings clarity, speed, and consistency in care to six million adult NHS patients (soon to launch for children’s mental health and neurodiversity, too).

Mental health has moved from the margins to the centre of NHS reform. The 10 Year Health Plan for England’s focus on prevention, early intervention, and digital access reflects a recognition that mental health must be treated with the same urgency and precision as physical illness.

For too long, the system has relied on crisis management rather than prevention, and on overstretched professionals forced to navigate incomplete information. Now, the challenge is delivery: translating national ambition into everyday reality for patients and clinicians.

The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care’s plan calls for three major shifts – from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention. Nowhere are these more urgent or more achievable than in mental health.

The Access Gap

Demand for mental health services has never been higher. Waiting lists for children, adults, and neurodiverse patients have surged, with many waiting months for assessments or therapy. Clinicians spend valuable time gathering basic information, patients are rarely able to access mental health services outside office hours, while patients repeat their story multiple times before receiving appropriate support.

The result is a system overloaded at the front door and inconsistent in outcomes. Delivering the NHS’s new commitments to mental health – faster access, earlier intervention, and prevention – requires a new way of thinking: intelligent triage, structured assessments, and scalable digital infrastructure.

This is where Psyomics’ work is transformative.

The Psyomics Model: From Assessment to Action

Psyomics’ digital platform, beseen^TM, created by clinicians and scientists from the University of Cambridge, bridges the gap between patient need and clinical capacity. Its model is simple but powerful: use structured, biopsychosocial assessments to capture each patient’s story once, in depth, and share it with the right clinician at the right time.

“Digital innovation isn’t about replacing clinicians – it’s about giving them time back to care.”

The platform allows patients to record symptoms, social factors, and life context before their appointment. Clinicians then receive a clear summary highlighting potential risks, comorbidities, and suggested pathways, allowing faster, better-informed decisions.

This approach has been shown to

• Reduce waiting times by enabling clinicians to prioritise complex cases.
• Improve engagement by reducing the need for patients to repeat their story.
• Increase accuracy in diagnosis by identifying patterns and comorbidities early.
• Support equity by standardising assessments across age, gender, and socioeconomic background.

From community mental health teams to talking therapy services, children’s mental health services, and neurodiversity pathways, Psyomics is demonstrating that innovation – when clinically grounded and ethically implemented – can directly advance the 10 Year Plan’s aims.

Delivery Through Partnership

What differentiates Psyomics’ approach is not just technology, but collaboration. The company’s success in supporting NHS trusts lies in how it integrates with existing care pathways, EPRs, and works with clinicians as partners, not vendors.

Each deployment is co-designed with NHS teams to reflect local priorities, workforce capacity, and patient demographics. This aligns directly with the Government’s wider vision for local delivery within a national framework.

The NHS is rightly cautious about risk and safety, and partnership models like Psyomics’ show that innovation can be introduced to provide increased caseload and waitlist visibility. By embedding evidence-based evaluation, transparent governance, and measurable outcomes from day one, the platform provides what policymakers are calling for: accountable innovation that delivers real-world results.

Prevention as Practice

One of the core ambitions of the 10 Year Health Plan is prevention – identifying and addressing problems before they escalate. Mental health is the most compelling case for this shift.

Digital assessment tools allow early detection of psychological distress, social risk factors, and potential comorbidities. This helps clinicians intervene sooner, reduce crises and connect patients with community-based support rather than acute services, such as the Emergency Department.

“Every early assessment is a step towards prevention – and prevention is the foundation of productivity.”

In adult community care, the Psyomics platform captures nuanced information about mood, trauma, sleep, and family dynamics – turning the patient’s voice into structured data that clinicians can act upon. In children and young people’s services, it enables earlier triage and more tailored interventions, giving families faster answers and reducing stress during long waiting periods.

Prevention is no longer just a public health concept; it is becoming operational through tools like these.

The Future of Shared Delivery

The NHS’s next decade will be defined by delivery – by the ability to turn aspiration into measurable change. In mental health, that means scaling what works.

To achieve this, health leaders must

1. Empower ICSs to adopt proven technologies that improve access and equity.
2. Invest in digital-first pathways that free clinical time for complex care.
3. Measure success by outcomes, not activity, ensuring prevention is rewarded.
4. Build ethical confidence, ensuring AI and data use are transparent, fair, and co-designed with patients.

The NHS cannot do this alone. It will take a network of partners – innovators like Psyomics, clinicians, academic experts, and community organisations – to make prevention-led, data-informed mental health care a national reality.

From Vision to Impact

The early progress of the 10 Year Health Plan shows that reform is possible when delivery is shared. Mental health can and should be the leading example: a field where technology, clinical expertise, and patient voice come together to deliver lasting change.

As Psyomics’ experience shows, innovation is not an end in itself but a means to deliver faster, fairer, and more compassionate care. The future of the NHS will be measured not by plans written, but by lives improved.

www.psyomics.com

The NHS 10-Year Plan sets out ambitious goals for mental health services, but delivering on these promises is far from straightforward. The challenges aren’t about ambition; they’re about the system itself. Commissioning, procurement, and executing meaningful change is complex, slow, and often risk-averse. For startups like Psyomics, a digital front-door technology provider for mental health services, these barriers are very real.

Navigating Risky Hurdles

The NHS is designed to mitigate risk. Decisions pass through multiple layers of approval, budgets are annual and inflexible, and movement of funds is tightly restricted. Promising innovations can face slow progress or get stuck in “pilot graveyards” with no clear path to scale. Change fatigue is real: staff are prioritising immediate pressures over potential innovations, capacity is limited, and the system isn’t set up for rapid transformation.

Startups operate differently. Risk is part of our DNA. We iterate quickly, make fast decisions and are conscious of cash flow. Change isn’t a threat, it’s essential for survival and growth. This mismatch between ambition and action explains why collaboration often feels like an uphill struggle. Procurement frameworks prioritise risk mitigation, not innovation, and complex approval layers, vague contracts, and fragmented commissioning mechanisms can kill momentum.

Turning Ambition Into Reality

Delivering the NHS 10-Year Plan requires more than good ideas; it demands solutions designed for scale, accountability, and sustainability.

‘The NHS is designed to mitigate risk’ ~ Dr Melinda Rees CEO

In this landscape, where the NHS is both commissioner and service provider, Psyomics acts as a trusted assessment platform across primary, secondary, and tertiary care. By reducing repeated patient storytelling, accelerating time to treatment, and standardising assessments, the platform exemplifies how digital innovation can align with the 10-Year Plan while overcoming systemic barriers. Our proven track record of supporting the NHS includes

· Scalability: map existing care pathways to see where new solutions fit naturally. Innovations should follow outcome-based “test and scale” models, rather than pilots with no clear path forward, to ensure successful initiatives can grow across the system.

· Accountability: be transparent about a pilot’s scope, limitations, and ambitions. Embed practical milestones and draw on frameworks such as

NICE’s Early Value Assessment to make progress measurable and aligned with system-wide priorities.

· Sustainability: speak the NHS language – cost-effectiveness, ROI, and cost-utility. Collaborate with analysts, academics, and evaluation experts. Every innovation must be backed by robust evidence, demonstrating value to clinicians, patients, and the wider system.

Real-world Impact

Psyomics helped the NHS to see the benefits of this approach across multiple patient pathways

· Adult Community Services: the Psyomics platform captures robust symptom assessments alongside patient histories, helping clinicians select the right care pathway. This improves engagement, streamlines clinical flow, reduces administrative burden and allows faster, more comprehensive initial assessments.

· Children and Young People: early symptom assessments, including input from carers, support more refined pathway selection. Clinicians can engage patients and families more effectively, streamline assessments and track outcomes using PROMs.

· Neurodiversity Diagnosis: long waits can be stressful, but the Psyomics platform identifies comorbidities early, helping clinicians signpost care and provide a positive waiting experience. A biopsychosocial formulation upfront enables priority pathway selection and holistic care.

· Talking Therapies: comprehensive patient profiling identifies complex cases quickly, freeing Tier 3 clinicians’ time and improving referral-to-recovery rates.

The Path Forward: Partnership, Capacity, and Outcomes

Although improvements are slowly being made, the system isn’t built for innovation. Driving real change requires partnerships. Early collaboration builds credibility, aligns motivations and ensures relevance. Increasing capacity must be a priority, not an afterthought. Above all, patient outcomes must guide every decision.

Inaction is the greatest risk to patients. Progress starts with trust, shared purpose, and a mindset shift: change isn’t a threat…it’s progress, but only when driven by clarity and commitment from all sides.

The Psyomics Approach

Psyomics has developed a digital pathway to streamline mental health assessments for adults aged 18-65. Created with clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and the University of Cambridge, the platform standardises how clinicians capture patient data, reducing inconsistencies, administrative burden, and delays.

Patients provide information on symptoms, social determinants, and personal factors such as suicidality, family dynamics, and financial security. Clinicians use this data to determine the most appropriate care pathway, ensuring timely, personalised support. Key benefits include

· User-friendly Process: 25 per cent of submissions occur outside office hours, increasing accessibility.

· Comprehensive Data Collection: clinicians make faster, better-informed decisions.

· Streamlined Referrals: patients no longer repeat their story multiple times, improving engagement.

‘Patient outcomes must guide every decision’ ~ Dr Melinda Rees CEO

By combining clinical expertise with cutting-edge technology, Psyomics is helping shape the future of mental health care, making it faster, more efficient, and more patient-centred.

Final Thought

The NHS 10-Year Plan is ambitious, but its success will depend on more than intent. The current system often works against innovation, making collaboration essential to driving change. Early partnerships can build credibility and ensure new approaches remain relevant, while patient outcomes must always come first – underpinned by trust, shared purpose, and clear commitment. Delivering the plan requires systems that welcome innovation, partnerships that close gaps, and technologies that allow clinicians to focus on what they do best: caring for patients.