A government-funded mental health platform, primarily owned by PwC and the University of Sydney, “does not seem to have demonstrated clinical outcomes of healthcare value”, a study has found.
Despite receiving $33m from the government via a non-competitive grant, transparency and mental health advocates expressed concern about the closed grant process and argued an open and competitive tender for the $33m investment would have ensured value for money.
Guardian Australia previously revealed that the former government led by Malcolm Turnbull in 2017 awarded the grant to the for-profit company Innowell to develop a mental health app. Known as “Project Synergy”, it was scrapped after health workers at pilot sites found it to be an administrative burden.
A new study published by CSIRO’s Australian Health Review journal raises further questions about the value for money achieved for taxpayers from the Innowell app.
Researchers, led by Associate Prof Jeffrey Looi from the Australian National University’s school of medicine, examined findings from an independent review of the project made available through a freedom of information request and examined peer-reviewed scientific papers published about the app.
They found there “is little to no evidence” that the project ensured patients were connected to care without the need for general practitioner assessment and referral and that there “was very limited uptake of the InnoWell referral platform in the trial sites”.
“For the significant investment from the Australian federal government, the Project Synergy/InnoWell platform does not seem to have demonstrated clinical outcomes of healthcare value to date,” the paper concluded.
The paper also found there was no mechanism through the project to capture service user experiences, and therefore it was not possible to make any definitive conclusions about equity of access or consumer experience.
The chief executive of Innowell, Syed Ahmed, said the Innowell platform is currently being used in live, critical healthcare settings in Australia and overseas “to support thousands of people”.
“Our clients report compelling evidence of significant improvements in mental health outcomes and lives saved through real-time clinical interventions,” he said.
Dr Piers Gooding, a senior research fellow with Melbourne Law School, said: “There is always a risk that research doesn’t deliver expected outcomes.
“At the same time, there is hype around digital technology like AI – and industry pressure – that can shut down critical reflection.
“Digital approaches are often presented as an unquestioned good, particularly in the mental health field. In the mental health field, this is made worse by generally poor efforts to enquire about service user experiences and views.”
The platform was described by Innowell as “a customisable digital tool that assists assessment, monitoring and management of mental health issues and maintenance of wellbeing” through collecting personal and health information from consumers and their service providers.
Despite part-owning the company, the University of Sydney paid Innowell to provide the mental health app to staff and students while using their de-identified data for research, a move the tertiary union previously described to Guardian Australia as a “violation of the university’s relationship with its students”.
Gooding said the awarding of research funding should be dependent on comprehensively finding out the views and experiences of those such technologies are designed to help.
“Mental health service users and their representative organisations should be guiding research funding in this area, to help decide where digital systems should – and should not – be applied, and who should govern them,” Gooding said.
