A Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with the University of Bath is a three-way collaboration between a company, the University, and a graduate, funded by Innovate UK for a transformative business opportunity. For over 40 years, KTPs have been helping companies to innovate for growth by accessing the UK’s world-leading knowledge base. Here we look at two KTPs between the University of Bath and Mayden.

About Mayden

Mayden is a digital tech company based in Bath delivering improved patient outcomes.

Mayden is a health tech company based in Bath. They specialise in best of breed, thoughtfully designed health tech solutions – building an ecosystem that helps health and care services tackle their biggest challenges with confidence.

Mayden’s focus is on providing data-driven care through digital tools that enhance service efficiency and improve quality of care. The company’s mission is to empower health and care providers by streamlining operations and improving outcomes for patients. Designed in partnership to drive improvements in care delivery, their software supports NHS Trusts, local authorities, voluntary and private sectors.

Mayden’s flagship product, iaptus, is an electronic patient record (EPR) designed to capture and report the NHS Talking Therapies dataset, whilst securely managing client records and clinician workflow. Trusted by over 200 organisations and managing more than a million referrals each year, iaptus combines secure data handling, smart integrations and real-time insights, backed by friendly support and the highest standards of security.

The Challenge

Chris Eldridge, Operations Director at Mayden, at the Digital Health Rewired conference in Birmingham.

A 2017 Mental Health foundation survey found that current levels of good mental health are extremely low and that collective mental health is deteriorating. Like the rest of the NHS, those tasked with treating mental health are expected to do so under increasingly tight budgets and with fewer resources.

The NHS Talking Therapies dataset is one of the most advanced datasets within the NHS. A strong government focus on the programme led to significant increases in the number of patients accessing treatment and recovering.

Yet whilst Electronic Patient Records (EPR) are fundamental to delivering effective mental health treatment, Mental Health (MH) services do not currently have a EPR which covers all requirements.

Analytical capabilities within iaptus offered the prospect of tailoring treatment decisions to individuals, based on in-depth analysis of historical data rather than guesswork. However, Mayden lacked the required capabilities in complex statistical analysis to identify patterns in patient and treatment profiles for a higher quality NHS Talking Therapies dataset.

Chris Eldridge, Director of Operations at Mayden and Senior Business Employee for both KTPs, says:

We lacked the specialist, academic, leading-edge knowledge to begin to understand how predictive analytics, pattern recognition and computational statistics could be applied to these complex datasets in order to spot significant patterns and build models to support decision making. Integrating understanding from this comprehensive and complex dataset will require analysis that is currently beyond the capabilities within the company.

The KTP Goals

Mayden’s strategic vision was to support MH Trusts by addressing the gaps they had within their existing systems. This was achieved by providing the patient record system of the future, aligned with the NHS strategy, to support clinical services record better patient data for improved care decisions.

The main goal of the first KTP therefore, was developing technology for clinical practice to help improve attendance of mental health appointments through predictive modelling. This involved embedding highly specialised statistical skills within Mayden to develop models for real-time monitoring of patient dropout, assessed through the technology. These statistical models were then applied as useful support tools for decision making within NHS Talking Therapies services.

Chris Eldridge, Director of Operations at Mayden, says:

We appreciate the value of the data we hold. Our strategy therefore was to put the power provided by the data back in our client’s hands, providing the tools and information they needed to improve their services.

The second KTP followed on from the first, which was awarded 'Outstanding' by Innovate UK on completion. This second partnership utilised process mining and computer simulation to further advance Mayden’s analytical tools, enabling MH care services to better analyse and predict patient flow. This was with the goal to achieve improved monitoring of demand and capacity for more effective and efficient care, through bespoke care pathways.

Benefits to Mayden

Dr Alice Davis, University of Bath doctoral graduate and KTP Associate on the first KTP between the University of Bath and Mayden. She is now Product Owner at Mayden who was the Business Partner Supervisor on the second KTP.

The data science upskilling provided by the University of Bath academic team, for complex statistical analysis of big data, was embedded within Mayden. This enabled the company to develop and commercialise products for end users to make informed decisions regarding patient care.

Mayden integrated this knowledge within their Developers, Data Services, and Account Manager teams. This led to a new type of product for their clients to take forward the decision support and patient-centred aspects of their strategy.

This first KTP directly benefited all four of Mayden’s strategic aims for expansion:

Optimising iaptus to meet market needs
Expanding into other clinical areas
Exporting to other countries
Increasing analytical expertise and product suite

The second KTP combined three complimentary threads:

Backwards looking view of service performance, patient wait times, dropouts and care pathways
Understanding the impact of wait times on patient engagement with talking therapies
Building dynamic models for Talking Therapies services to predict future capacity

Being able to analyse historic service performance ultimately supported the trajectory and decision making of MH care professionals for optimising future patient outcomes.

Benefits to the University of Bath

Dr Theresa Smith, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath and Academic Supervisor on the first KTP with Mayden.

Professor Julian Faraway, Professor of Statistics at the University of Bath with 30 years’ experience in the application of statistics to healthcare, was the Lead Academic on the first KTP with Mayden. Senior Lecturer, Dr Theresa Smith, also from the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Bath, was the Academic Supervisor. Dr Smith says:

When I first started at the University, I knew that I wanted to do statistics in health but I didn’t necessarily have that network of collaborators to do statistics in health with high impact. Starting the KTP in the first year of my lectureship helped me get a project that I could really sink my teeth into and gain confidence in working with that area. It then also helped me build into new research areas with that confidence and experience.

The involvement from the University of Bath through the KTP enabled the academic team to strategically apply and drive innovation within Mayden. Importantly, it consolidated a relationship with the company. This led to a second KTP, led by Professor Christos Vasilakis, Director of the Centre for Healthcare Innovation and Improvement (CHI2) in the School of Management at Bath, and further collaborations for the University. Dr Smith says:

The KTP benefited by research initially in small steps with a few publications and talks at conferences. Then it built into a longer-term research portfolio. We invited them for a week-long workshop where we thought about different longer-term ideas. This led into a PhD Studentship and we’ve had multiple grant proposals and collaborations together, including some big successful ones that will take us through to the next five years.

The KTP Associate

Lizzy Yardley, KTP Associate for the second KTP between the University of Bath and Mayden.

Dr Alice Davis is a University of Bath doctoral graduate who was the KTP Associate for the first KTP with Mayden, where she worked to transfer the critical knowledge she obtained during her doctorate. Alice has since joined the Mayden team as a Research Product Owner and was the Business Partner Supervisor on the second KTP. Dr Davis says:

Before starting my KTP I did a PhD at the University of Bath in Statistics and I was able to directly apply some of the things I learnt during my PhD in the KTP. I was able to embed this knowledge by running a number of workshops with staff at Mayden. During the KTP the University of Bath provided me with a lot of support. As an Associate I was able to access a number of courses and project management support. At Mayden we were able to access a lot of bid writing support and build future collaborations from that as well. Since the end of the KTP I have actually joined Mayden fulltime as a Product Owner for their Research Team. The KTP enabled us to build long lasting relationships with the academics involved and other people at the University of Bath as well.

Lizzie Yardley, KTP Associate for the second KTP with Mayden, had the opportunity to showcase innovative methodologies and preliminary findings of their KTP project at the European Conference on Operational Research at Copenhagen in 2024. Speaking at the conference, she said:

Our participation in the European Conference on Operational Research highlights the innovative strides being made through the KTP between the University of Bath and Mayden. By focusing on the critical areas of demand monitoring, capacity planning, and mental health service delivery improvements, this project aims to deliver significant advancements in the efficiency and effectiveness of NHS talking therapy services.

Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP): Mayden

Two Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) between health tech provider Mayden and the University of Bath have been completed to support NHS Talking Therapies.