Here Tony Doyle from Qbtech tells us his motivation for becoming an NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) fellow following the announcement of 11 new fellows for 2020, what he hopes to get out of the scheme and his experiences of striving to improve diagnosis of ADHD.

QbTest measures attention, impulsivity and motor activity all at the same time. These are the core symptoms of ADHD and accurate measurement adds objectivity to support faster diagnosis. I have worked for Qbtech, the company behind the QbTest, for just over nine years and in that time I’ve seen the tool spread to 20% of all acute and mental health NHS trusts in England. I have always worked in health and care, including roles in pharmaceuticals and in mental health. When I saw the position at Qbtech it married up my personal interests in mental health and technology. What really appeals is that we’re making a real difference to people.

Currently it can take on average 18 months to go from the first appointment to diagnosis and much longer from the initial suspicion of ADHD. In general, children present symptoms of ADHD at an early age and the time it takes to get a diagnosis really interferes with their primary school years and they struggle throughout this instrumental time in their education. By speeding up the diagnostic process we can avoid this disruption and give them the same opportunities to thrive. Seeing that first-hand gives us a motivation to spread this even further throughout the NHS.

Applying to become a Fellow

I had thought about submitting an application to the NIA in previous years, but one of the deciding factors was a conversation I had with an East Midlands NIA fellow from last year – Jimmy Endicott from ChatHealth. He told me about how pivotal he’d found being part of the programme. I saw him and a few other fellows present at an event and talk about their journey and innovations – I really liked what they discussed and the opportunity this afforded to them, getting their innovation out there on a valuable platform.

My motivating factors to be part of the NIA are:

Personal development
Having the opportunity to refresh and enhance my knowledge of the NHS and how commissioning works.

A platform for QbTest
The NIA gives me a chance to present on the innovation to the right people and being part of the NIA adds additional credibility. Qbtech doesn’t have a sales team and we never will. Therefore, networking and awareness is such an important thing for us.

Working with East Midlands AHSN

I started working with the East Midlands AHSN as part of their Mental Health Innovation Exchange in 2015. Following the event, Qbtech responded to a call for funding to run a demonstrator project across the region, largely as our innovation hadn’t had traction in this area, to prove the impact QbTest could have for ADHD diagnosis.

The East Midlands AHSN demonstrator ran in tandem with a clinical trial by the Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) Assessing QbTest Utility in ADHD (AQUA). Coupled with the AQUA trial, the real-world demonstrator gave us a more complete body of evidence.

What the East Midlands AHSN did, along with other elements, was provide superior governance. As well as project management, the evaluation team went into the trust and made the evaluation happen – we never could have done that! Working with the East Midlands AHSN gave me an appetite to work with the wider AHSN Network.

If I said what my ideal would be, it would be for every child and every adult in the UK who is suspected to have ADHD to have an objective test like ours. I look forward to continuing to strive for this and working as part of the NIA to get even closer to this goal.

To find out more about QbTest and our work with the East Midlands AHSN, you can read the AHSN Network Atlas case study.

Author 

Tony Doyle, Qbtech Ltd Managing Director