We were joined for a recent interview by Byron George, co-founder and CEO of PCMIS Health Technologies, a provider of digital solutions designed to drive efficient service management and facilitate effective healthcare treatment. Byron chatted about some of his team’s recent projects and the outcomes they have seen; their collaboration with the University of York and other partners; and his hopes for the future.
As CEO, Byron’s responsibilities lie in providing strategic direction, vision and leadership for the company and his team. “On a personal level, I’ve got over 25 years of experience in providing large-scale digital health innovation to the NHS and NHS-related organisations. We’re proud to be getting up in the morning and making a difference to people’s lives.”
PCMIS’s focus is on providing large-scale case management digital tools and patient portals, Byron told us, “which are all underpinned by cutting-edge evidence-based research, in collaboration with industry partners and world-leading academic mental health researchers”.
The aim is to deliver clinically safe, efficient, and effective digital pathways, and to support clinical decision-making processes. “We design what we do to help services adapt, streamline and transform,” he said, “but also ultimately to reduce clinical risk and offer cost savings and efficiencies.”
As a wholly-owned subsidiary of the University of York, PCMIS is “proud to be the UK’s leading evidence-based clinical management system. Our origins were part of a collaboration with the university and mental health researchers to develop these digital tools; and since then we’ve broadened our work to include Ireland, Hong Kong and Australia, continuing to strive to develop and introduce new digital interventions.”
“The university has recently launched its Institute of Mental Health Research, which is a testament to York’s vision and values,” Byron added. “We are very proud to be a part of that.”
Current projects, outcomes and priorities
Byron reflected how he previously chatted with HTN back in 2019, at which time PCMIS was in the early stages of delivering its Outcome Feedback technology – the clinical decision-making tool to help support recovery and reduce deterioration which went on to win the ‘mental health solution of the year’ in last year’s HTN Awards. At the time, we highlighted how the real-time, data-driven mental health tool is designed to help clinicians in tracking and evaluating patients’ treatment response during therapy.
“This digital tool has now been clinically proven to reduce deterioration in complex cases by 73 percent,” he explained. “We’ve demonstrated that an additional 4,000 patients had recovered thanks to the clinical use of this tool, and we’ve been doing some further research and evaluation to drive that forward even further.” When used in routine practice, the technology has also demonstrated a 25 percent reduction in the number of treatment sessions required per patient in order to reach the same treatment outcomes. This equalled a saving of 2,500 sessions annually, and a £250,000 yearly saving for each service.
Recent statistics demonstrating the positive results of services using Outcome Feedback Technology:
PCMIS also continues to support one in three NHS Talking Therapies services, as well as supporting children’s services, community services, and more recently employment support initiatives. “Ultimately, all of that is based on interoperability, collaboration, and innovation,” Byron said.
On the challenges surrounding this type of work, Byron talked about scalability of the technologies, and the challenges of introducing innovation and achieving an effective level of uptake. “We are looking at helping services to support that, making sure it doesn’t impact that day-to-day delivery of care,” he reflected.
Another challenge can be in getting the best out of technology once it is in place; as such, one of the areas in which PCMIS offers support is through the provision of a “dedicated, free clinical training platform”, which aims to empower clinicians to make the most of what they have to use.
One of the things Byron is most proud of is PCMIS’s record for high data quality. “When we were involved in supporting national roll-outs of some of these programmes, we had a 99.6 percent data completeness,” he said, “which gives services invaluable insight into how their service is operating. It means they can really focus in on how things are going, any challenges they are facing, and where improvements can be made.”
That data can also be used in a research context, Byron continued, “we hold approximately five billion mental health data points. That makes us probably one of the largest and most complete mental health datasets in the world. There’s so much potential value in that for identifying new ways of developing healthcare and models of care.”
Looking ahead
“We have lots of research in the pipeline, including with the universities of York and Sheffield,” Byron shared. “This speaks to the willingness and receptiveness of NHS organisations, universities and research teams, and technology partners, who all have this shared vision to add value to services that in isolation wouldn’t be possible.”
When it comes to the future of PCMIS, Byron talked about plans to continue to collaborate and innovate to support the overall goal of making a positive impact on the lives of staff and patients. He referenced a session he attended at HETT in September, where conversations revolved around financial constraints and “the restrictions these can place on innovation and longer-term opportunities – this often means we end up in a situation where business cases focus on in-year spend, and not forward thinking strategies. That is at the detriment of joined-up thinking and collaboration.”
The focus on collaboration is another reason why the PCMIS team was so pleased to win the HTN Award for their work on mental health, Byron added. “That project really was a joint effort, so it was great to be able to really showcase and celebrate that. In terms of the future, we are looking forward to working with other organisations who share our vision, and NHS healthcare professionals who are passionate about making a difference.”
When it comes to future work and collaborations, “we definitely have a social responsibility to be an enabler for these technologies, and we are in a position where we should be able to support new innovation and not stifle the delivery of clinical excellence by putting technology barriers in place”, he considered.
Continuing on the topic of social responsibility, Byron shared that PCMIS has been developing new research on health inequalities, “working together to introduce technology that can then be placed in community settings to help patients access services in certain deprived or hard-to-reach areas – those barriers are slowly being removed more and more every day, which I think also helps patients feel more confident in the technology available to them”.
It’s nice, according to Byron, to be “in a position where we can say we are making a difference and have tangible evidence to support our claims, and we ultimately want to continue to deliver innovative, impactful work”.
We’d like to thank Byron for taking the time to share his insights around digital mental health with us.