According to the draft guidance released by NICE today (4 Nov 2022), digital health technologies can be used to help children and young people with symptoms of anxiety, while additional evidence is being produced to see if the benefits they promise are realised in practise.
The five accepted products offer self-guided games, videos and quizzes based on CBT principles aimed to support children and young people in anxiety and low mood management.
The technologies might be made available to some children and teenagers who have been diagnosed by a mental health professional as having mild to moderate anxiety or low mood symptoms. Where appropriate, users may also get other forms of support, such as in-person CBT, in addition to digital therapies.
The online and mobile technologies are part of a NICE pilot for early value assessment (EVA) of medical technologies (we first wrote about it in July – attached below this article).
EVA’s goal is to find the most promising technologies in the areas of health and social care where there is a demand that has not yet been satisfied and to provide timely recommendations and enable earlier conditional use of the technologies in the NHS while further evidence is being produced.
A consultation on the draft recommendations is open from today Friday 4th November until Friday 18th November 2022 at nice.org.uk.
Remap’s previous post in July 2022 on this issue:
On Monday 18th July, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (#NICE) held the Early Value Assessment: Driving Innovation into the Hands of Health and Care Professionals webinar.
The webinar provided more details on how Early Value Assessments – which will assess the clinical and economic value of digital health devices – will work, and how they will support NICE’s push to encourage #innovation.
The Early Value Assessments were announced last month, on the 15th of June. They were introduced in response to the “explosion in digital health products”, with an aim to support National Health Service (#NHS) commissioners in determining which technologies offer the maximum benefit to patients.
Two pilot digital health topics began their Early Value Assessments in June, with published findings expected in October. The assessments will focus on areas where there is the “greatest need”, and both pilots are digital apps for depression and anxiety in children. During the webinar, ten pilots in total were announced for 2022/23, with adult mental health, early cancer diagnosis, cardiovascular disease and elective recovery also included.
NICE provided more detail into how the process will work, with the early value assessments providing timely recommendations on digital products before full guidance is written. Also discussed were the benefits NICE hoped to see, including quicker signals to the health system on promising technologies, better evidence to inform commissioning decisions, earlier access for patients and a clearer pathway to market access for industry.
Sources:
- NICE conditionally recommends digital cognitive behaviour therapies for use in the NHS https://www.nice.org.uk/news/early-value-assessment-digital-cbt-children-young-people-with-anxiety-and-low-mood. Accessed 04th Nov 2022
- NICE guidance. EVA: Digital cognitive behavioural therapy for children and young people with symptoms of anxiety and low mood. https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/indevelopment/gid-mt580/consultation/html-content Accessed 4th Nov 2022