Psicon and MHS partner to expand access to ADHD assessments

In the face of rising demand for ADHD and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) assessments, Psicon worked with Multi-Health Systems Inc (MHS) to reshape its referral and assessment workflows to expand access to care while preserving clinical integrity.

According to NHS statistics, there was a 5.5% increase in new ADHD referrals in June 2025 compared to the previous year, with up to 668,370 adults and children in England waiting for assessment.

This increase in demand has put services under pressure and forced patients and their families to endure long waits for assessment, with around two thirds of adults and 60% of children waiting more than one year.

There has also been a significant rise in the number of ASD referrals, with NHS figures showing an increase of 11.9% between June 2024 and June 2025.

Psicon, one of the UK’s largest providers of neurodevelopmental diagnostic assessments, treatment, and support for autism, ADHD, and mental wellbeing, has faced a critical challenge: how to expand access to behavioural health services without compromising clinical quality?

Its response was to collaborate with MHS, a developer of industry-standard psychological assessments, to redesign its workflows and automate its entire assessment process.

Speaking at a Digital Health webinar ‘Quality without compromise: How Psicon reimagined behavioural health at scale’, in September 2025, Louise Simpson, director of operations at Psicon, explained how the results of the digital project has exceeded initial expectations.

“I could never have imagined it would have this impact.

“We’re comfortably managing 5,000 referrals a month now. When we first started talking about this a couple of years ago, we were getting about 250 referrals a month.

“The number of patients that have been impacted by this already is now over 40,000. And it’s saved over 20,000 admin hours in a year – that’s the equivalent of around 11 full-time administrators,” Simpson said.

A patient who is referred online to Psicon by their GP at 9am will receive acknowledgment of the referral and links to screening within minutes.

It is possible to upload all the required information to the patient’s record and move to clinical triage on the same day.

“Previously, that could have taken months,” said Simpson.

A manual process that was slow and stressful for patients and their families, and generated a huge workload for Psicon’s admin team, has been transformed.

Simpson said that the digital solution is “making the journey much quicker and of a higher quality for patients.”

Embedded into Psicon’s solution are scientifically validated ratings scales published by MHS, such as Conners 4®, which help to provide exceptional reliability to the results, Simpson explained.

Psicon’s intake process indicates whether an individual is likely to receive a diagnosis of ADHD or ASD if they are referred for assessment, giving reassurance to patients and preventing NHS resources from being wasted.

Janelle Bierdeman, manager of healthcare solutions at MHS, said that the tools that have been incorporated in Psicon’s automated assessment process include validity scales that can detect when someone may be pretending to have ADHD and also assess for frequently co-occurring conditions like depression and anxiety.

New workflows are also being developed to use the fullest version of the assessment tools to provide additional clinical information for children who might be home-educated or adults without access to a reliable observer

“There are a lot of children and adults who get screened out of having an assessment because they don’t have information from a secondary setting,” said Simpson.

“For example, we often hear from our adult clients that they don’t have any living relatives that knew them when they were a child, and the parents of children who are home-educated can’t get information from a school.

“Rather than say, ‘sorry, you can’t have your assessment’, we’re looking at the other versions of the Conners and the Conners Adult ADHD Rating Scales™ 2nd Edition (CAARS™ 2) and the Autism Spectrum Rating Scales™ (ASRS®) to be able to gather more evidence to support an assessment.”

Data collected during the assessment process are a baseline that can be used to track improvement in symptoms during ADHD treatment, which Psicon also provides.

“It’s not always obvious to patients whether their ADHD symptoms are improving, particularly with our adult population, because there is so much overlap with mental health symptoms,” said Bierdeman.

“When you can present them with data that shows they’re improving, that’s powerful. It’s good for the patient, but it’s also good for the NHS.

“We want to get these patients to a point of stability so they can enter into shared care agreements with primary care colleagues.

“That means they don’t need to keep coming back to the specialist provider.”

Simpson’s advice to providers looking to streamline and improve their workflows in the face of increasing demand is to “never compromise”.

“You can deliver quality at scale. It is possible.

“You just need to find partners that share your vision and your values. With MHS it’s been a cohesive relationship from day one.”

Bierdeman, who is a certified school psychologist, said that working with Psicon on the solution, brings her “a lot of hope as a clinician”.

“We got to solve real problems here.

“We leaned into these challenges and thought them all the way through to the end,” she said.

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