eGRiST Mental Health Risk Assessment and Safety Technology

One-in-six adults will have suffered mental health problems in the past week. Mental health carries an economic and social cost of £105bn/annum, with suicide the leading cause of death for those between 10 and 34-years. There are many vulnerable people needing mental health assessments, but they require trained people to carry them out and the data collected is not easily analysed or shared.

Even practitioners ?nd it dif?cult to create meaningful management plans from their assessments and patients do not feel that they have much of a say.

Aston University has been researching these issues for more than a decade. It has developed a web-based questionnaire, GRiST, which models the way practitioners think and reason about mental health and associated risks of suicide, self-harm, harm to others, vulnerability, and self-neglect. GRiST breaks down each risk concept into simple questions that help assessors work out a person's risk level from 0 (minimal risk) to 10 (maximum risk).

GRiST has been adopted by several NHS Trusts and other mental-health services over the years and has built up a unique data set of 1.5 million risk assessments. Each one selects a person's relevant subset of answers from 300 precisely-quanti?ed questions and links them to a speci?c risk level. EGRIST Ltd was spun out of Aston to capitalise on this technology.

Our proposal is to develop an automated, digital, structured decision support system known as eGRiST, that can predict levels of mental-health risks and provide advice on how to manage them safely. Innovation arises from the combination of its intuitive psychological model for representing mental health expertise and the development of appropriate arti?cial intelligence and machine learning algorithms.

These will improve the accuracy of risk evaluations of assessors by benchmarking them against their colleagues and help them generate more effective plans for reducing risks, both in the immediate and longer term. The expertise will also be shared with patients through self-assessment technology, so that patients can understand and manage their own mental health in collaboration with their clinical team.

The resulting "canopy of care" will deliver reliable, safe, and effective mental-health support for anyone, wherever they are, at the click of a button. It will streamline mental-health services by more accurate referrals, improve communication between patients and practitioners, and give people more control over their own mental health.