Last week, Hale House hosted the second annual Mental Health Innovation Showcase, a collaboration between the Mental Health Innovation Network (MHIN) UK and Harley Street Health District that brought together providers, investors, founders and clinicians.
Trust takes longer to build than the technology does
Two case studies, Speek Health X Black Country ICB and London Psychiatry Clinic X MagVenture, opened the day, both showing what private providers and the NHS can build together when the relationship is given long enough to scale into something real.
Their advice to anyone selling into the NHS was to identify who holds the budget and who owns the KPIs early, map procurement and information governance against that, and position the pitch as urgent clinical pressure rather than a wellness narrative.
Five carefully selected startups took the stage to present their innovations
Each company had built something for a different point in the pathway where the system is supposed to hand a person on and instead lets them go.
- Meela matches people to therapists on preference and need, as a bad first match will send people away from therapy altogether.
- Tellmi offers anonymous peer support for young people, with human moderators who step in as needed.
- Play Well For Life’s Dragons of Afterlands is a game-based tool that supports young people with transitions, emotional regulation, inclusion, and attendance.
- Univa has revolutionised eating disorder care with AI-driven monitoring and personalised care for people with eating disorders via an app with a monthly subscription
- InsideOut demonstrated its on-demand therapy and AI coaching, built to help employees easily access the tools they need to look after their mental health.
Cross-sector experts shared their views in a panel discussion
Three themes ran through the discussion:
- Implementation is the biggest challenge. Rolling out any new technology always creates more work before teams feel the benefit, so a smooth onboarding matters as much as the product.
- Evidence alone no longer carries a pitch. What really helps is translating those results into the language their buyer uses, using terms such as “workforce capacity”, “service pressure”, and “cost per outcome”.
- Safety belongs in the design. The panel pushed back on the assumption that clinician-led care is automatically safe and digital care automatically risky. Where AI appears, it should support the person while a clinician leads the care, with escalation routes and safeguarding built-in from the get-go.
Key takeaways
- Technology can make the system faster and the consultation slower, freeing clinicians from admin so they have more time to look at patients instead of screens.
- Innovation has to meet teams where they currently are; some NHS clinicians may still be dealing with walkie-talkies, patchy Wi-Fi on the wards and electronic records that don’t talk to each other.
- The future depends on finding the right fit for each individual faster, with data-driven matching that moves clinical outcomes.
