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BriefMEDTECH

AI Psychiatric Triage System MindTriage Goes Live Across UK NHS: Wait Times Drop from 6 Months to 2 Weeks

AI psychiatric triage system MindTriage has launched across 48 NHS trusts in England. Using structured questionnaires and AI assessment to route patients into different urgency queues, it reduced average non-emergency psychiatric wait times from 6 months to 2 weeks.

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The UK's National Health Service (NHS) announced in May that the AI psychiatric triage system MindTriage has fully launched across 48 NHS trusts in England. Jointly developed by King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry and AI company Babylon Health, the system addresses the long-standing problem of excessive wait times for NHS mental health services.

MindTriage's workflow: patients complete a structured mental health questionnaire through the NHS App, and the AI system assesses their mental health urgency level based on responses, routing them to appropriate triage queues. Urgency is classified into four levels: crisis (within 24 hours), severe (within 1 week), moderate (within 2 weeks), and mild (within 4 weeks).

NHS Mental Health director Claire Murdoch said: "Before MindTriage, the average wait for non-emergency psychiatric appointments was 6 months. Now, patients assessed as moderate urgency can receive their first consultation within 2 weeks."

However, ethical concerns about automating psychiatric triage persist. British Psychological Society president Sarb Bajwa said: "Delegating mental health assessment to algorithms carries misdiagnosis risk. A patient assessed as 'mild' by the system may actually be in severe psychological crisis."