Bossa Health

People do not fall through the mental health system so much as through the gaps between its parts: the months on a waiting list, the weeks after therapy ends, the moment of being told their symptoms are not severe enough. Bossa Health runs a CQC-registered online clinic that joins psychiatry, therapy and clinical pharmacy on one record, and is building an app that triages people to the right self-help and re-checks them every fortnight.

In England more than a third of people referred to community mental health care wait over a year, most say they get worse while they wait, and the same gap opens again when a course of therapy ends or when someone is judged not unwell enough for specialist care. Most people in those gaps have more than one need, and a single-purpose app treats the one it was built for, which for someone with trauma and severe depression can make things worse rather than better.

Bossa Health started with the clinic. Psychiatrists, therapists and clinical pharmacists work on one shared record, so a patient tells their story once, medication is reviewed rather than left to chance, and care steps up or down as they change. The app extends that into the gaps: validated questionnaires, a choice of structured programmes, a fortnightly re-check that shows a worsening trend early, and a route to a professional or to crisis support when answers call for it. The clinical rules behind the triage have their evidence on file and go through clinical review, and the company is taking the app through medical-device registration so practices, employee assistance programmes and insurers can rely on it. Founded in London by Yasmin Bou Karim.