Dutch digital healthcare company sets up in the city

Tim Newns

A digital health company with a platform for mental health diagnosis and treatment has chosen Manchester to base its first UK office.

Based in Maastricht, with an additional office in Berlin, TelePsy develops user-friendly interventions, questionnaires and treatment tools to help improve mental health. Last year 200,000 individual patients were treated with its software, and 10,000 clinicians now use it for a variety of diagnosis and treatments.

The Manchester office will be headed up by international manager Jaime Essed, who oversees all of the international business of TelePsy.

He will build a local management and operational team in Manchester that will especially focus on the north of the UK and is hiring locally for a range of positions.

Over the next five years TelePsy is expecting to build a team of 15 employees, including psychologists, eHealth developers, marketing, helpdesk and software developers.

It will be based at the MedTech centre on Manchester Science Park. A joint venture between between MSP, Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CMFT) and TRUSTECH, the facility is a specialist business incubator for new and early-stage digital health businesses.

Essed said: “TelePsy decided on Manchester because it provides us with a very welcoming and ambitious environment that has a lot of potential for innovative companies like ours. Costs are relatively low compared with the cities in the south but the opportunities are equal.

“Manchester will be the base from which TelePsy will grow in the UK. Together with universities, clinics and CCG’s we will create mental health interventions that are customized to the needs of UK mental health practitioners.

“We believe strongly in collaboration and with the help of MIDAS we are already in talks with Manchester’s science networks and universities, and looking at how we can encourage collaboration with our existing European contacts.

“We’re also looking at how the Manchester business community can engage more openly with mental health, and so we’ll be looking to work with companies and academics to organize events on mental health related topics in the future.”

Tim Newns, chief executive of MIDAS, Manchester’s inward investment agency, said: “Greater Manchester is the first and so far only city-region in the UK to have both full control of its healthcare budget, and to fully integrate health and social care. This provides the region with a unique opportunity to test new treatments and integrated delivery models, and adopt new systems and technologies.

“By choosing to base themselves in Manchester, TelePsy will find they have easy access to a rich network of gateway organisations delivering support, in addition to direct access to the largest integrated NHS cluster in the UK.”

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