Fora Health partners with the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) and King’s College London
Supporting people living with bipolar disorder and their secondary care teams
We are delighted to share that Fora Health is partnering with SLaM NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London to support people living with bipolar disorder and their secondary care teams. Funded by the UK National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), this study will leverage Fora Health to help optimize maintenance treatment for bipolar disorder and facilitate patient self-management.
With Professor Allan Young and a team from the King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (and in close partnership with patients and clinicians at SLaM) we are adapting the Fora Health service to integrate into routine clinical workflows at the trust.
We have worked with the King’s team to adapt our existing shared decision-making features to meet the specific needs of people with bipolar disorder, to support them in exploring treatment options and playing an active role in choosing the right one for them.
To help patients understand their options, we are also partnering with Bipolar UK, a national charity dedicated to bipolar education and support. Through Fora Health, patients can access Bipolar UK’s trusted resources or use our ‘Ask Fora Health’ feature to receive answers to their questions. This collaboration ensures that patients can access reliable, high‑quality information as they work with their care teams.
We have also added new functionality that helps patients and clinicians establish ‘response plans’ for early warning signals of mood changes, and set them in motion as needed. These plans promote safe self-management of symptoms, complementing our established symptom and medication‑tracking features.
Lastly, a key goal of this project is to explore how Fora Health can deliver measurable care value, supporting patients while reducing overall NHS costs for bipolar management.
This project builds on our recent deployments supporting treatment optimization for major depressive disorder at Advocate Aurora Health, at ACCESS Community Health Network, and with the American Academy of Family Physicians National Research Network. You can read more about this work here.
For more information about the project, please see the NIHR funding description.