Mental Health Data Innovation Programme

The Children and Young People's (CYP) Risk Factors initiative is a mental health incubator project, which aims to improve the mental health and wellbeing of vulnerable young people, through the connection of information from services across the Cheshire and Merseyside region.

A pilot project has been launched in Liverpool, and we are working with Liverpool City Council and Alder Hey Children's Hospital Trust to develop digital solutions to help health and social care practitioners better assess potential risks to children's safety and identify which services are already working with a child or family.

This initiative brings together information from different agencies and services into one easy to use system, which should lead to earlier support for young people and their families and better co-ordination between different mental health and support services. We are also aiming to build a learning network so the solution can be scaled across the ICB and beyond.

Our goal is to make it easier for professionals to work together effectively. We expect this new approach will help us identify mental health concerns earlier, make better decisions about how to support and safeguard young people and ultimately improve wider long term health outcomes for children, young people and their families. The initiative is being developed step by step, with regular input from the multi-agency professionals who will use it, to ensure it meets their needs and works effectively in real world situations.

Crucially, this initiative places great importance on the voices of practitioners and young people in shaping the solution. We believe those with first hand experience – both the professionals working directly with young people and the young people themselves – have invaluable insights to offer. To facilitate this, we are establishing a community focused on multi-agency safeguarding. This will provide opportunities for practitioners from various agencies to collaborate, share experiences, and directly influence the development of the tool.

Social Finance, a non-profit organisation specialising in using data to solve social problems, is our partner in this initiative. They are working closely with Mersey Care, Liverpool City Council and Alder Hey. This collaborative effort aims to use data more effectively to improve mental health outcomes for vulnerable young people in our community.

Quantexa is a global AI, data and analytics software company pioneering Decision Intelligence to empower organisations to make trusted decisions with data in context. They have been contracted by the University of Liverpool, who are working in partnership with Mersey Care to deliver AI decision intelligence technology to support the data action accelerators programme funded by the Office of Life Sciences. The partners are working to bring together siloed data sources to enhance research capabilities and provide actionable insights to their care teams through accurate, up to date linked data.

Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust has launched a new digital tool to support care co-ordination for patients in acute mental health crisis. Developed in partnership with Palantir Technologies, the application functions as a monitoring interface for the urgent care mental health First Response Service,

It assists in mapping patients to appropriate on duty staff and prompts a swift response to mental health crises. The initiative ultimately aims to boost crisis response efficiency, improve patient outcomes and ensure the model “right place, right time, right people” is consistently applied. 

Mock App data featured in above image.

The new digital solution will improve the existing crisis response process, supporting NHS professionals and helping improve patient care by equipping staff with a summary of critical, up to date patient information during initial assessments. It also presents a capacity and demand dashboard which includes a live overview of open referrals (see above).

The Mental Health Data Innovation Programme will support continued development of this product to enable a wider range of use cases.

Palantir builds software that enables public, private and non-Governmental organisations to securely integrate data and AI. They are currently helping deliver the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) software which enables NHS organisations to bring together the information they hold to better plan and deliver care, and reduce administrative burdens on staff.

Holmusk and Mersey Care have been working closely with the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) to develop a digital solution to support identification of early warning signs that might affect the quality and safety of care in inpatient settings.

This initiative is in response to the recent national reports such as, the Rapid Review into Data on Mental Health Inpatient Settings, publication by NHS England that provides guidance for safer staffing, guidance from the Mental Health and Learning Disability Quality Transformation Programme and findings from national inquires in Nottingham, Manchester and Essex. 

The focus for the solution is to use data in a way which supports easy oversight of early warning signs across a range of areas, and supports the delivery of safe, high quality care for patients and staff. Following the development of a proof of concept version of MaST for inpatient settings and consultation with staff and service users groups at the beginning, we will launch a pilot in Mersey Care by the end of 2024. This will be  followed by spread and adoption in Cheshire and Wirral Partnership and a selected group of fast followers. 

Mock data included in above image

Mersey Care was the first mental health trust to introduce MaST in the community in 2017, a caseload management solution underpinned by intelligent analytics to help generate insights into which patients are more or less likely to use crisis services in the next 28 days. It also supports the recommendations outlined in the Community Mental health Framework and a number of mental health trusts nationally have now adopted it.