Mobile early detection and connected intervention to coproduce better care in severe mental illness

Current approaches to the management of severe mental illness have four major limitations: 1) symptom reporting is intermittent and subject to problems with reliability; 2) service users report feelings of disengagement from their care planning; 3) late detection of symptoms delay interventions and increase the risk of relapse; and 4) care systems are held back by the costs of unscheduled hospital admissions that could have been avoided with earlier detection and intervention. The ClinTouch system was developed to close the loop between service users and health professionals. ClinTouch is an end-to-end secure platform, providing a validated mobile assessment technology, a web interface to view symptom data and a clinical algorithm to detect risk of relapse. ClinTouch integrates high-resolution, continuous longitudinal symptom data into mental health care services and presents it in a form that is easy to use for targeting care where it is needed. The architecture and methodology can be easily extended to other clinical domains, where the paradigm of targeted clinical interventions, triggered by the early detection of decline, can improve health outcomes.