Transforming Psychosis Care with Digital Therapeutics: Integrating Cutting-Edge Technologies to Improve Lives of People with Serious Mental Illness

Public summary

Careloop Health is a digital therapeutics company which spun out from The University of Manchester in 2021. It’s focus is to improve care for people living with severe mental illness.

Careloop’s software can be used to predict problems, prevent relapse and personalise care for patients. The system comprises of a smartphone app where patients record their symptoms, a repository to store patient data and a web based dashboard to monitor symptoms.

Five clinical trials conducted over the last 10 years have fed into the development of Careloop Health.

The company’s first digital therapeutic has been launched to treat psychosis. (Careloop for psychosis).

Psychosis and schizophrenia affect about 1% of people. 1 in 5 will fully recover but 80% of people will suffer relapse. As people are only seen by clinicians every 6 months in clinical practice, early symptoms of relapse are often missed. Careloop monitors symptoms daily and targets each patients/ unique relapse prodrome (period of distinct symptoms leading to a relapse).

Our researchers took part in the EMPOWER study which used the Careloop Health app and platform along with clinical triage and peer support to detect and prevent relapse in patients with schizophrenia. The research was led by University of Glasgow and involved patients in Scotland and Australia. The trial results published in Jun 2022 in Lancet Psychiatry were the first time that a digital therapeutic had been shown to reduce relapse (CareLoop Health’s platform reduced the one-year psychosis relapse rate for patients with schizophrenia, from 46% to 24% ).

Prof Shon Lewis co-founder of Careloop Health and University of Manchester said “In addition to the personal benefits of recovery, scaling these results up would save the NHS hundreds of millions of pounds per year due to less inpatient admissions."

In Mar 2024 NICE recommended that Careloop can be used in the NHS for monitoring symptoms of psychosis to prevent relapse whilst more evidence is generated. (Health Technology Evaluation 17).

The Careloop system can integrate any disease-specific prediction algorithm and could therefore be used as a remote monitoring tool for different patient populations in future.

Impact date	2021
Category of impact	Health and wellbeing, Technological
Impact level	Benefit