Building the NHS side of mental health innovation: introducing M-TAC
There is no shortage of good ideas in mental health technology. Researchers and companies across the UK are developing tools that could help people get support sooner, give clinicians more time, and ease pressure on services stretched more than ever. Yet very few of these tools make it into routine NHS care, and fewer still stay there.
Closing that gap is a big part of why the Mental Health Digital Innovation (MHDI) workstream exists. MHDI is co-led by Professor Pauline Whelan and Dr Trina Histon and sits within the Mental Health Goals programme, a UK Government initiative funded by the Office for Life Sciences that brings together people with lived experience, researchers, the NHS and industry to speed up progress in mental health. MindTech Bridge, a programme hosted by the NIHR MindTech HealthTech Research Centre, builds the pathways that help evidence-based mental health technologies get adopted, funded, and scaled. Within MHDI, MindTech Bridge is launching the Mental Health Technology Adoption Collaborative (M-TAC), a national network helping evidence-based technologies that meet real NHS needs reach people at scale.
Why so many pilots go nowhere
Most digital mental health tools reach the NHS one Trust at a time. Each organisation runs its own governance and assurance checks, its own evaluation and its own procurement, often for a product another Trust has already looked at. Pilots often run on short-term funding, so even when they work, there can be no budget to keep them going. Clinical teams are asked to adopt new tools without the time to embed them properly. The result is duplicated effort, promising pilots that quietly end, and companies that increasingly see the UK as a hard place to build and scale.
No single Trust can fix this on its own, but together providers have the scale, the experience and the collective voice to change how mental health technology is adopted.
What M-TAC is
A lot of effort goes into pushing technology to the NHS, and universities, companies, and Health Innovation Networks all play an important part. What’s been missing is the capacity on the NHS side to pull the best of it through. That’s the gap M-TAC aims to fill.
M-TAC will be a network of NHS mental health providers that select, implement and adopt technologies together, sharing the work, the risk and the learning.
We expect it to do four things:
Bring members together as a community to share what has worked, what hasn’t, and support each other through implementation.
Help members agree on shared priorities, so effort goes into the problems services actually have.
Provide shared resources and expertise, so no Trust has to start from scratch on governance, assurance and evaluation.
Act as a testbed for better ways of evaluating, adopting and paying for technology.
The timing matters. The recent Fonagy Review into mental health conditions, ADHD and autism calls for an ambitious approach to scaling safe digital tools within integrated care pathways, and a new mental health strategy is on the way. National approaches to assurance, access and evaluation are changing too. We think this is a real opportunity for providers to shape how that change happens, and to do it together. When one Trust works something out alone, the learning usually stays there. When Trusts work it out together, everyone benefits.
Designing it with the NHS
We didn’t want to arrive with a finished model. On 15 October, we brought together clinical and digital leaders from 13 NHS Mental Health Trusts across England for a day of co-design, chaired by Dr James Woollard (Chief Clinical Information Officer at Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust and NHS England National Specialty Adviser for Digital Mental Health) hosted at the Wellcome Trust.
People were remarkably open about what gets in the way, from pilots that end when the funding does to governance repeated in every organisation. They were just as clear about what helps, and about the value of learning from peers facing the same challenges. There was a strong appetite to work together, starting small and focusing on what makes a real difference.
What happens next
We’re now following up with the Trusts who want to be involved and setting up a space for them to keep the conversation going. We’re aiming to launch M-TAC formally in early 2027. If you work in an NHS mental health provider, including one that wasn’t in the room, we’d love to hear from you. Contact Sarah Pontier at Sarah.Pontier@nottingham.ac.uk and follow MindTech Bridge on LinkedIn for updates.
A huge thank you to everyone who took part, and to our colleagues across the MHDI workstream.
Dr Aaron Kandola, Programme Director, MindTech Bridge
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