In our latest interview we spoke with Dr Julian Nesbitt an ex A&E, now GP Doctor and NHS clinical entrepreneur at NHS England with wide experience in working in the NHS and in specialist mental health secondary care services.
Dr Nesbitt founded DrJulian Medical Group due to his passion to improve mental health access for the country. He has previously published original research and has good understanding of this process.
What is the Dr Julian?
Dr Julian is an innovative mental healthcare platform that increases accessibility to mental healthcare.
It can take many months to obtain help in the NHS. We connect patients securely within days, seven days a week, to vetted mental healthcare professionals offering them choice of time and type of appointment such as video/audio/text they want. All therapists are appropriately qualified and have on-line training/experience. We match patients to therapists using filters of language/issue and therapy type or they can choose their own.
As part of the system patients take anxiety (GAD7), depression (PHQ9) or WSAS assessments, which are stored in the patients own profile as a permanent record. Text conversations are also kept in the patient’s own profile for ongoing reference.
The system is designed so that every Mental Health Trust/Provider has their own tenancy branded and customised to their needs. We are working on integrating into IAPTUS/Prism.
How is the platform benefiting Mental Health Trust and Provides?
Using our therapists the NHS can use Dr Julian to address periods of high/exceptional demand or reduce waiting lists. The NHS could use their own staff on the platform thus providing patients with further choice.
So long as patients have internet access they can have appointments from wherever it works best for them. We empower patients with choice of therapist, time of appointment and choice of medium of their appointment either via video/audio or instant messaging.
The platform has a sophisticated matching system allowing patients to be matched to the right therapist for them through language, issue they need help with and therapy type.
In an industry with no regulation we have set the standard to the highest level and are recognised through our affiliation with the governing body of online therapists. All our therapists are appropriately trained to work online and undergo a diploma in online therapy. They also have appropriate supervision to work online with a trained online supervisor.
What is the most significant achievement for your organisation in the past 12 months?
We have signed 2 NHS contracts with Thurrock and Preston with potential for rapid expansion into this market. Trials in Thurrock have been very successful with overwhelmingly positive patient feedback and recovery for our patients. We have been accepted onto the NHS Digital Accelerator program in recognition of how we can help revolutionise mental health provision.
What projects are you working on at the moment?
As well as the NHS we are working with businesses to help improve their employee mental healthcare. We can offer each business their own branded portal where employees can easily access a therapist of their choice 24/7. We have partnered with multiple organisations such as Zoom Doc, Qured, Doctor Mortons, Ada health, Your MD to provide their mental health service in a whitelabelled pattern. We are in discussions with occupational health companies and insurance companies to provide their mental health provision.
What problems and challenges are there to overcome?
The NHS is a difficult market to navigate with no national structure and so each individual trust must be approached individually. We are looking to raise a significant investment now to enable our rapid expansion with very positive results and significant traction.
What is the biggest technology challenge?
We must continue to adapt and improve the technology to match requirements of individual organisations. The benefit of our platform is that we can already offer customisation for each portal we create allowing adaption to each organisations requirements. We are integrating with the IAPTUS NHS system to allow seamless data transfer into the NHS.
What is new for your organisation?
With our ability to track data outcomes we are now looking to use data and artificial intelligence with personality matching to allow us to find out what is the best therapy an individual with a particular personality and background will respond best to. We have a real focus on patient empowerment and finding the best therapeutic relationship for that patient. We are also looking to add in a fourth medium of Virtual reality and avatar therapy for our patients on our platform.
