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This ADHD awareness month, we are highlighting work we are leading to improve the care pathway for people with ADHD and support the identification, development, and use of digital technologies.
The work will bring together insights and learning from people with lived experience, data, research, innovation, and clinical practice to explore how digital tools can help address current challenges for people with ADHD and the care pathways that support them.
It supports the delivery of the national shift of health services from analogue to digital wherever possible, to help people access the support they need more quickly and improve outcomes.
In this blog Tracey Jackman, Head of Innovation Programme Delivery at HIEM tells us more about the work and how we are using learning from our previous programme – Focus ADHD which improved ADHD diagnosis in children and young people.
“Focus ADHD is an example of a previous innovation programme that started off as a Real-World Evaluation in the East Midlands. QbTest: a digital objective assessment tool to aid ADHD diagnosis in children and young people, was piloted in three trusts before being rolled out across the region and becoming part of a national Health Innovation Network programme.
At the end of the national programme, 66 NHS Trusts had adopted QbTest across England and by the end of March 2025 this stood at 84 which is around 80% of all eligible trusts.
More than 163,000 young people have benefited from earlier diagnosis. The innovation also saved over 40,000 appointments and released 132,652 hours of clinical capacity – clinical time that could be reassigned to further support children, young people and their families.
The programme’s success factors are captured in a ‘blueprint’ document, “Innovation implementation, readiness and resourcing” that collates learning from across the 15 HINs.
We are using this insight to take forward further work to explore how digital tools could improve the experience and outcomes of adults with ADHD and enhance the care pathways used.
As part of our work to understand the environment that adult ADHD services are operating in and the challenges they face, we have undertaken literature reviews and spent time examining national strategy and policy documents.
We have held focus group-style hub meetings for people who are Experts by Experience and for people who work in adult ADHD services to help us understand where digital tools might be able to help. This could include making the assessment process easier, offering better support to people while they are waiting for their next appointment and enabling communication with supporting teams.
We will also be seeking to understand how acceptable digital tools are to people with lived experience of ADHD and how the tools can be most beneficial and accessible.
Using this insight, we will then meet with innovators, researchers and developers to share what people told us about current benefits and further opportunities for digital tools to support and empower people with ADHD and enhance the services they access.
On 4th December we are holding an Innovation Exchange virtual event to share some of the innovations and digital tools that are currently available. A fuller document, containing more details on the innovations available will also be developed.
Following the Innovation Exchange, we will be providing funding and support for health services wanting to test and deploy digital tools to address the need(s) of their service and/or of adults with ADHD.
HIEM will work with testing sites to capture learning, benefits and outcomes to inform case studies, business cases and implementation resources. This will optimise sustainability and further adoption and spread.
During Spring of 2026, HIEM will produce an interactive resource that will summarise all that has been undertaken and the resultant resources and learning.
Our work will feed into a wider Health Innovation Network (HIN) cluster programme, across five regional HINs, to implement and test a new service model developed by Northwest Coast HIN.
It’s an exciting piece of work that we hope will bring real impact to Adult ADHD services and the people who use them. It’s early days in the journey, but I am very excited by the possibilities of this project and what it could accomplish.
If you would like to get involved, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
HIEM Head of Innovation Programme Delivery