We sat down with Arden Tomison, CEO and Co-Founder of Thalamos to chat about how they responded to the pandemic, his advice for startups and what they’ve learnt from this challenging period.
Can you tell us in a few words what Thalamos does?
We help people with acute mental illness get access to care more quickly. We do that by digitising the Mental Health Act; so our first job is to digitise a process that, up until this point, has been carried out in paper forms. Most people have heard of being sectioned, which is when somebody gets taken to hospital because they’re very unwell mentally, and that process of being sectioned refers to a section of the Mental Health Act, and that is what we are digitising.
Has the pandemic impacted on the work that you were doing?
Yes, significantly. I think prior to the pandemic, there was a lot of discussion about important legal processes - there’s been a lot of debate for a long time about whether you can undertake these processes digitally, or whether it has to be done on paper, because of signatures. [I think] the pandemic forced the Department of Health to update their guidance to say it can be done digitally, so that was a big help for Thalamos. I think there has been a wider push for digitisation more generally in the NHS, and what was very refreshing right at the beginning [of the COVID pandemic] was that there was a clear decision making process. Individual Trusts and leaders within those Trusts felt empowered to make on-the-spot decisions that were in the best interests of their patients and their staff.
Your response has been to make your software available for free to the NHS. Is it solely for the NHS, or for any practitioner, and what was the uptake? How many clinicians or psychiatrists have used it?
We went from having early-stage conversations with 3 trusts to advanced conversations with 20 and about 4 that are live now.
Wow!
The reason we made it free was because we knew we could help, and we knew we had a solution that could help. Thalamos is a for-profit social enterprise, so we’re working towards our B-Corp social certification. This means all the investors and employees in Thalamos have signed up to and agreed to a set of social values, one of which is that we will do what’s in the best interest of the service, and what’s in the best interest of us as a company. In this case, it’s to make money and survive. At the time I felt that it was in the best interest of patients and the NHS that we made our software free, not because we thought they needed to save some money, but because we knew we could help and we knew that procurement departments were trying really hard to try to buy PPE, laptops, and infrastructure for people to work from home. We thought that if we tried to put more of a burden on them, it would slow down the speed at which people would get access to our software and therefore the speed at which we could help.
How has the response from the healthtech community been? I.e. Other startups, people within your networks, other healthtech companies that focus on mental health, or focus on giving tools to the NHS to help digitise.
My impression of this period has been quite Darwinian. If you have a product that works, then you’ve seen rapid growth. If you’ve been all ‘smoke and mirrors’, you’ve been found out. When COVID arrived, Thalamos said, “Right, we need to go into product development, we’ve got to make sure we can deliver what the NHS needs now.” We released a huge amount of new functionality in quite a short period of time. I do think that what we’re seeing is a massive acceleration of change, where the NHS will move another step away from the legacy technology providers, and closer to a new age of cloud-based modern health technology companies.
My last question is: Are there any lessons you’ve learnt during this pandemic, or a piece of advice you would like to give other health tech startups?
A: I think “don’t panic” would be my phrase. I did! Suddenly opportunities changed completely and I was thinking, “I've got to do everything, we’ve got to do everything and this is an opportunity for us.” But [I would say] pause, make a plan and stick to it. I think if I was to go through this again, I would pause, make as much of a plan as possible, especially short term planning, like asking “Where are we going to be in two weeks? Where are we going to be in four weeks?” We went from being quite strategic to completely tactical. And there probably should have been a bit more of a balance. We had to be tactical and things were changing but I think if we put a bit of strategy in there, even if we only knew a couple of weeks in advance, it might have led to less anxiety.
Thanks for your time, Arden! Keep an eye out for the full interview in our upcoming annual report.
Interviewer: Sara El Sheekh
Words: Emily Lewis