Conversational information collection tool to access talk therapy

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Evaluation of a conversational information collection tool to access talk therapy

• IRAS ID

  317349

• Contact name

  Max Rollwage

• Contact email

  max@limbic.ai

• Sponsor organisation

  Limbic Limited

• Duration of Study in the UK

  1 years, 11 months, 31 days

• Research summary

  Limbic Access is a United Kingdom Conformity Assessed-marked medical device used to help patients access mental health care from Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services in the National Health Service (NHS) and private providers in England. Limbic Access is a chatbot that functions as a conversational artificial intelligence tool to both help the patient the navigate the IAPT self-referral process and the clinical team to collect information about the patient’s mental health.
  Limbic Access aims to improve diagnosis and treatment for IAPT by providing the clinical team with the information they need in the most useful format to aid diagnosis. Evaluating Limbic Access in terms of clinical efficacy (e.g., did the tool improve treatment outcomes, diagnosis or wait times for the patient) and service efficiencies (e.g., did the tool reduce assessment times or improve staff wellbeing) will form the basis to understanding how to improve the information provided to the IAPT services. We will also train machine learning models on the pre-triage data to predict the likely diagnosis. We hope this will provide further insight into the information needed for successful diagnosis and treatment. These data are already being collected by Limbic Access (pre-triage) and IAPT services (triage-to-end of treatment). This study aims to evaluate end-to-end therapeutic care by linking pre-triage data to triage-to end of treatment data. All patients who are referred to IAPT services via Limbic access will be invited to take part in the study. The study is observational and aims to understand usual care, so patients’ consent is just for their Limbic data to be linked to their IAPT outcome data. We hope providing therapists with the best information to aid diagnosis will reduce the burden on therapists and improve patient care.

• REC name

  London - Surrey Borders Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  22/PR/1424

• Date of REC Opinion

  2 Dec 2022

• REC opinion

  Further Information Favourable Opinion