Mayden’s contribution to neurodivergent diagnosis & assessment services
Neurodiversity
11 December 2025
By Jen
Neurodivergent diagnosis & assessment services & digital tools
How Mayden is contributing to the wider ecosystem to support timely and efficient neurodivergent assessment & diagnosis and talking therapy services.
An interview with Dr. Philippa Kindon and Jenny Freij
Q: Can you provide some background on Mayden?
Philippa: Mayden started 25 years ago, transforming healthcare with digital technology. It began with cancer treatments but for the last 15 years, our main focus has been mental health, particularly the Improving Access to Psychological Therapy (IAPT) program, now NHS Talking Therapies. Our goal is to use evidence, insights, and a data-driven approach to improve patient outcomes, always in partnership with our customers. We are now using our expertise and applying it to our work with neurodiversity services.
Q: What research have you done recently regarding neurodivergent assessment & diagnosis services?
Jenny: We found a strong connection between neurodiversity and mental health, leading us to research how to support customers in this area. A key finding was the importance of the patient’s “surrounding network”—friends, family, teachers, SENCO leads—in assessment, diagnosis, and follow-up care. This led us to identify an opportunity to make product tweaks that enable much easier, digital communication to these supporters, replacing time-consuming, difficult-to-track paper processes.
"We can support local work that services want to capture while still enabling effective national reporting."
Q: Neurodiversity pathways have a lot of variability. How does Mayden’s system handle standardisation versus local needs?
Philippa: We appreciate that standardisation can be confused with a less personal approach, but we believe the opposite is true. Our product allows for careful local configuration while still providing standardised, national information.
Jenny: We can support local work that services want to capture while still enabling effective national reporting. For example, with SNOMED codes, our system manages the complex, user-unfriendly codes behind the scenes. Clinicians can use language they resonate with on a day-to-day basis, and the system translates this into the necessary SNOMED codes for national reporting to bodies like the NHS, creating a win-win.
Q: How can digital tools impact service waiting lists?
Philippa: Digital technology is critical for operating at scale, which is essential given the growing waiting lists in neurodevelopmental services. Our configurable care pathway tool already helps services offer innovative support while people are waiting and looking toward the future, we’re developing innovations to stratify wait lists for a more needs-led, personalised approach.
Jenny: Digital tools reduce the administrative burden, which in turn supports the reduction of wait lists. Key examples include:
- Care Pathway Tool: This foundational feature enables services to map out a patient’s journey, which then allows easy identification of bottlenecks (like specific waiting lists) so managers can deploy resources more effectively. It also helps to automate routine administrative processes.
- Digital Referrals and Online Appointment Booking: Enabling self-referrals or digital-route GP referrals minimises time spent collecting information over the phone or processing paper. The online appointment booking feature empowers patients to choose a time that suits them, significantly increasing attendance rates (with high booking rates shortly after the link is sent) and reducing administrative effort.
"We’re developing innovations to stratify wait lists for a more needs-led, personalised approach."
Q: Can services pick and choose which digital tools they use?
Jenny: Absolutely. Configurability is a key building block of our system. Services can select the combination of value-add features—like self-referrals versus healthcare professional referrals—that best meet their unique needs.
Q: Is the system applicable to both adult and children/young people’s services?
Jenny: Yes. The high level of configurability means the system can be adapted to suit any service setting, and the care pathway can be easily updated as best practice evolves. The ability to change the care pathway is included in the subscription.
"Configurability is a key building block of our system."
Q: How does what Mayden offer fit with the government’s 10-year health plan?
Philippa: We align with all three pillars of the plan:
- Hospital to Community. The flexibility of our product supports community-based, needs-led care, such as through mental health support teams in schools. Surfacing data also helps services address health inequalities by showing who is or isn’t accessing support.
- The Move to Digital. The digital pathway can improve choice, flexibility, access, efficiency for patient communication, experience and clinician and administrators time.
- Sickness to Prevention. We support early intervention, through ease of access features like online appointment booking. Additionally, we provide data that enables services to secure funding for preventative initiatives. See below for our conversation with HFEH Mind.
How HFEH Mind used the data in iaptus to gain funding
Q: How do you ensure Mayden systems meet the different needs of clinicians, admin, patients, and reporting bodies like NHS England?
Jenny: It’s all about collaboration. We use agile principles and work closely with stakeholders from all these groups—through interviews and workshops. Therefore, we can ensure that our developments focus on real-world problems and that implemented solutions are beneficial for everyone.
Q: What is Mayden’s vision as it expands its support to more types of health and care services?
Philippa: The vision is to make the entire health and care process as seamless and smooth as possible. This is for those running, delivering, and accessing those services. This is achieved by realising customers’ visions through continued collaboration and focusing on what people with lived experience truly need.
Jenny: Additionally, at the core, we believe in a system that is designed for your service. It should be highly configurable, and built on a foundation of data and analytic support. We want to share this value across the healthcare industry.
"This is achieved by realising our customers’ visions through continued collaboration and focusing on what people with lived experience truly need."
Q: The system also supports mental health, addictions, weight management, and gambling harms. If a service provides, say, a dementia or diabetes service, should they get in touch?
Philippa: Yes, if your service doesn’t fit the mould, that’s even more reason to talk to us.