Understanding and improving patient flow in the NHS Talking Therapies programme

The NHS Talking Therapies (TT) programme in England follows a "stepped care" approach for treating patients with common mental health problems, where effective but less resource intensive treatments are delivered to patients first and more intensive interventions are only provided if required. The programme, which treats over a million patients each year, faces challenges in managing patient flow due to limited resources and pressure to achieve service standards. Research has found variation in clinical performance and stepped care implementation across sites, and has identified associations between service delivery and patient outcomes.
We aim at developing innovative, advanced, analytical tools to help improve understanding and management of NHS TT services’ demand and capacity. Our study analyses data from iaptus, the leading digital care record for psychological therapy services, to explore and model patient flows through talking therapy care pathways using process mining and other data-driven methods, to evaluate pathway performance and explore relationships between system performance and patient outcomes. The major impacts of this project are expected to be improved patient access to services, improved utilisation of resources, resulting in reduced waiting times, better recovery rates and reduced patient drop out.