Mental health services for children and young people (CYP), are experiencing an unprecedented crisis of need. Referrals to Child & Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) have increased by 53% since 2019 and with 75% of children and young people waiting more than four weeks for mental health treatment in 2020-21, many CYP struggle to access timely mental health support.
MyHealthE is an award-winning NHS based web platform co-designed with families that helps support the journey through CAMHS. It collects routine measures to assess and evaluate services, provides a ‘virtual waiting room’ with access to resources and information and enables children, young people and familes to take part in a range of research projects.
The initial idea behind HealthE came out of the community assembly South London Listens and was adopted by the CAMHS Digital Lab, which is a partnership between South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) and King’s College London and supported by the NIHR Maudsley BRC. The Lab brings together a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, researchers, and informaticians to create and embed digital tools and services to improve mental healthcare for children and young people.
Impact summary
- Development and delivery of a web platform to enable families, clinicians and teachers to safely share routine information
- Creation of a virtual waiting room to provide resources and information to families on the CAMHS waiting list
- Enabling research participation for children, young people and families
- Expanding the platform from use in South London and Maudsley into other NHS trusts and for an older age group.
A digital solution to challenge of CAMHS
Frequent and reliable patient-rated routine outcome measurements (PROMs) are critical for assessing whether CAMHS interventions are effective, however uptake is traditionally poor. MyHealthE uses a secure and automatic text and email system to collect information from caregivers about their child’s mood and behaviour on a regular basis that is automatically uploaded to their child’s electronic health record
The platform has proved cost-effective and clinical and patient feedback has been highly favourable. It has been effectively implemented in 3 separate local authorities across 20 mental health teams, with the team delivering training for staff on how to use myHealthE, and increased collection of paired routine outcome measures by 500% in two years, moving SLaM from the lowest to highest quartile of PROMs reporting amongst all CYP mental health providers in England.
A key feature of myHealthE is Consent for Contact, families who might be eligible for research studies can be identified on MyHealthE and invited to participate in research. This has increased SLaM’s registration of families consenting to be contacted by researchers from 4% of CAMHS Caseload to 47%, with marked increase of recruitment amongst those from ethnic minorities.
Virtual waiting room
To improve access to services and empower young people while waiting for treatment, we have also launched the Virtual Waiting Room from within myHealthE in March 2023. Through the Virtual Waiting Room, caregivers whose child has been referred to SLaM can access a diverse range of mental health resources for themselves and their child. With CAMHS waiting times at an unprecedented high, the Virtual Waiting Room is a low-cost solution that provides resources and information to young people waiting for mental healthcare.
In the same year, we also integrated a teacher platform into myHealthE, where, like caregivers, teachers can upload PROMs. With around 4000 teachers now enrolled, monthly teacher completion of student mental health measures has risen from around 50 completions in November 2022 to over 700 in January 2025.
Awards and Recognition
Communications about myHealthE have been shared with a variety of audiences. The Virtual Waiting Room was promoted in the local press and celebrated as a success at South London Listens community assemblies which were attended by hundreds of members of the South London Community. myHealthE won the DigiLeaders 100 award for HealthTech Innovation of the Year 2024.
Individual members of the myHealthE team have also been awarded for their work on myHealthE including Sarjhana Brindha who won the Hidden REF Application of Research Award 2024. The team have published multiple academic papers including in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Mental Health. In 2023, myHealthE was added to the NHS Futures platform as part of their Digital Outcome Measurement Product Library of recommended tools to allow other NHS trusts to learn about the platform and enquire about procurement.
Watch a video below which was developed to explain the benefits of myHealthE and promote its use to other trusts.
Looking to the future
Progress has been made in the last two years in preparation for the expansion of myHealthE to other NHS trusts. Solent and Nottingham Trusts have been using myHealthE as part of the NIHR funded OPTIMA research trial and plan to continue to use the platform and expand it to more teams following the completion of the trial. There are also plans to expand myHealthE outside of the UK in a trial in the Republic of Ireland, for which we are currently seeking Information Governance approval. We will also be working with adult mental health teams in SLaM to adapt myHealthE for use with both working age and older adults.
As part of the South London Listens initiative, the Maudsley Charity have provided funding for further development of myHealthE to expand the platform for use by adolescents so that they can directly access resources and complete their own outcome measures. Work on this project is ongoing. As part of the adolescent platform, we are working with Dr Daniel Michelson to trial the hosting of Single Session Interventions within myHealthE for young people on the CAMHS waitlist.
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