Health tech startup achieves world-first certification for AI mental health chatbot

London headquartered health tech startup, Limbic, has announced that its psychological assessment tool, Limbic Access, has achieved Class IIa UKCA medical device certification, making it the first and only AI mental health chatbot in the world to earn this status for its clinical effectiveness, safety and risk management.

The certification confirms that its mental health e-triage chatbot, which is able to predict mental health disorders with an accuracy rate of 93 per cent, can be safely incorporated into the psychological therapy pathway to support patient self-referral, driving significant efficiencies to support overstretched clinicians and improving patient outcomes.

It comes as NHS Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services are experiencing significant capacity challenges in the face of record demand, with latest data showing a 21.5 per cent increase in people accessing NHS talking therapies services over the last year.

Dr Ross Harper, co-founder and CEO of Limbic, said: “This is a landmark moment for mental healthcare, as it provides strong evidence that our psychological assessment software, the first in the world to gain this level of certification, is a safe and clinically effective way to augment the therapy process within mental health services at a time when such support has never been more needed.”

130,000 NHS patients have so far accessed psychological therapy using Limbic’s AI mental health chatbot, making it the most widely used solution of its kind in the NHS.

UKCA auditors, SGS, reviewed clinical evidence generated from more than 60,000 referrals and found that, when compared with standard referral methods such as telephone calls and online forms, Limbic Access helps deliver:

• 53 per cent improvement in recovery rates
• 45 per cent fewer changes in treatment, due to increased triage accuracy
• 23.5 per cent reduction in assessment time - a saving of 12.7 minutes per referral
• 18 per cent reduction in treatment dropouts
• 13 per cent reduction in wait time for assessment
• 5 per cent shorter wait time for treatment.

Dr Harper continued: “Limbic Access is reducing the workload for IAPT services by gathering information through a friendly, supportive chatbot conversation and using its machine learning capabilities to deliver effective triage.

“The result is that clinicians are more informed ahead of appointments and can spend more time focusing on the patient; services have less admin to complete, and patients enjoy shorter wait times and faster recovery. It’s win-win-win.

“There is one additional benefit too – one that helps explain why those services that have implemented Limbic Access see an increase in patient referrals. It can be daunting to take the first step to accessing mental health services, and patients often dread having to articulate their most sensitive thoughts and feelings over the phone to another human.

“The fact that Limbic is unashamedly an AI removes the pressure from that conversation, while the warm, supportive tone of the chatbot means they still get the benefits of the human experience, just without the worry.”

By Matthew Neville – Senior Correspondent, Bdaily

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