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NHS Talking Therapies Digital Courtship

 

 

Tomorrow the Service is hosting a 3-hour webinar funded by two artificial intelligence agencies IESO and Limbic. This comes hot on the heels of the Irish Advertising Standards Agency finding SilverCloud guilty of breaching advertising standards in citing its’ recovery rate. In fairness I could see no such extravagant claims from IESO.  Nevertheless, IESO claims its:

 

 

‘app-based programme is comprised of a unique blend of evidence-based CBT approaches. They have been carefully selected having been shown, through analysis of ieso’s dataset of 750,000 hours of delivered therapy, to be the most effective with patients’.

 

But there is no published evidence that this ‘unique blend is effective’. Nor is there any evidence that the 750,000 hours of delivered therapy were assessed independently with fidelity checks to ensure that the alleged treatments actually took place.   

 

There is a computer adage GIGO – ‘garbage in, garbage out’ . There is no assurance  that the programme does not constitute ‘garbage in’.  But the programme is it seems user-friendly with a conversational style aping programmes for building your own website.  Unsurprisingly it has therefore gained traction:

Through our award-winning digital platform, ieso has delivered therapeutic interventions to 135,000+ people with over 750,000 hours of treatment provided. We use a typed modality which captures, with permission, the exchange between a therapist and patient all in an ISO27001-compliant manner’. 

There is an aura of misleading scientific respectability, is this yet a further breach of advertising standards?  AI may have a potential impact, but this offering is for the forseeable future likely to frustrate the consumer, who at a minimum will find it too            time-consuming.

 

Dr Mike Scott

 

3 replies on “NHS Talking Therapies Digital Courtship”

Hi Mike, coincidentally I have been working on the introduction of AI therapy in the NHS Talking Therapies service – including a discussion of ieso and Limbic’s endeavours in this area. The first of two sections on the subject can be found here – https://freepsychotherapynetwork.com/machina-ex-deo-ai-and-the-future-of-nhs-talking-therapies/ Part 2 out shortly. I view AI therapy as the next step in the hollowing out of the social and intersubjective through the utilitarianism of NHS CBT. Paul

I know for a fact that in some services, people who don’t “recover” on silver cloud are stepped across or up hence their data is not captured…we only know about the ones who don’t want to continue treatment. Data gaming (or fraud I claim) runs deep

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