The Wellcome Mental Health Data Prize: UK
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The Mental Health Data Prize – unlocking innovation in mental health science.
There is a wealth of data about mental health available that could be used to gain new insights but is not currently being accessed by researchers – this Prize is a solution to that problem.
The Mental Health Data Prize UK is an open challenge for teams with a bold idea for a new digital tool or application that uses existing mental health data in innovative ways.
It brings together people from academia and industry, offering funding, tailored support, and a vibrant learning community to help transform great ideas into scalable solutions that improve early intervention for anxiety, depression, and psychosis.
Delivered by Social Finance in partnership with Wellcome, the programme supports Wellcome’s mission to transform early intervention in mental health.
Winners of the first Mental Health Data Prize, which ran from 2022 to 2024, developed tools which are now being used both in mental health research and by policy makers.
The six successful teams have passed an intensive application process and have each been granted £100,000 to develop and test their prototypes – using existing mental health data to find solutions that improve early intervention for anxiety, depression and psychosis.
Over the next 9 months, we are supporting each team with a personalised support offer, building skills and capability to develop their prototypes.
Three of the teams will then progress to the sustainability phase – with an additional £300,000 and a comprehensive support offer to develop to a scalable product.
EQUITABLE EI
Too often, people experiencing mental health difficulties only become visible to services when they reach crisis point. We want to change that. The Wellcome Mental Health Data Prize gives us an exciting opportunity to explore how AI can help us see patterns of need that traditional approaches may miss and translate that knowledge into something useful for services.
Dr Hajira Dambha-Miller, Associate Professor in Primary Care Research, University of Southampton
EQUITABLE EI is a new project that will use large-scale linked health, social and environmental data to better understand patterns of hidden or unmet mental health need across communities. We will develop new epidemiological approaches and use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify people and communities whose need may not be visible in routine healthcare data.
Working with people with lived experience, clinicians and service planners, we will translate these findings into an interactive tool to support real-world decision-making. The aim is to help services identify need earlier, target resources more effectively and ultimately provide earlier and more equitable access to mental health support.
From Data to Care: Understanding Mental Health Service Impact
We are really excited to be working with DataKind UK on this project; Data to Care: Understanding Mental Health Service Impact. We hope we can use the funding and support from Wellcome Trust and Social Finance to better understand access and quality of mental health talking therapies.
Aidan Mersh, Associate Director Federation Services and Support, Mind
Mind is the leading mental health charity in England and Wales, fighting for a future where no mind is left behind. Through trusted information, life-changing services, advocacy and campaigning, they work to ensure everyone can access mental health support.
DataKind UK helps third sector organisations achieve their missions by strengthening their use of data analysis and science. For over a decade, it has enabled the UK’s third sector to make informed decisions using accurate, up-to-date information.
Together Mind and DataKind UK are developing a prototype analytics tool to help NHS-commissioned mental health service providers better understand the outcomes and impact of their services.
From Free Text to Trajectories
The Data Prize is a fantastic opportunity to bring our clinical, technical, and lived experience expertise together to tackle something that’s been a real blind spot in mental health data — medication information locked away in free text. Putting this team together has been genuinely exciting: pharmacists, psychiatrists, informaticians, and lived experience advisors all contributing from day one.
Dr Yamiko Joseph Msosa, Research Fellow in Health Informatics, King’s College London
From Free Text to Trajectories is developing a data tool that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to transform fragmented medication information in mental health records into research-ready longitudinal medication histories.
By combining structured prescribing data with information captured in free-text clinical notes, the tool will enable researchers, NHS analysts and policy teams to analyse prescribing trajectories, medication switching and polypharmacy at scale.
The project addresses a major barrier in mental health research by making complex medication data more accessible and interpretable, supporting new insights for early intervention in psychosis, depression and anxiety.
PATHWAYS-EI
My work sits at the intersection of child and adolescent mental health, neurodiversity and NLP, which were often studied in silos. The Data Prize gives us a valuable opportunity to bring these perspectives together and ensure that the technology reflects the complexity of young people’s help-seeking experience, and the struggles and barriers faced by their service providers, while producing evidence that is technically robust and clinically meaningful.
Angel Chen, Co-applicant, DPhil Candidate, Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology
When young people seek NHS help for anxiety or depression, information about their care is recorded in clinical notes and difficult to analyse at scale. The PATHWAYS-EI tool will turn these notes into useful evidence while protecting privacy. The tool runs inside secure NHS data environments and presents only cohort-level statistics, with findings remaining traceable to source records for validation.
Working with Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust and young people with lived experience, the team will identify where care pathways break down and whether access and outcomes vary across demographic groups or by deprivation, supporting fairer, more transparent service planning.
RISE UP
This team came together because no single discipline can crack wearable-informed early intervention on its own; you need clinicians, AI researchers, and people with lived experience in the same room from day one. The Data Prize gives us the space and support to actually build that, rather than just talk about it.
Dr Filippo Corponi, RISE UP Team Lead, Consultant in General Adult Psychiatry, Imperial
RISE UP is an open-source, one-stop platform that enables researchers, regardless of their coding experience, to study wearable activity data and spot early signs of depression, anxiety, and psychosis. Changes in sleep and activity often signal mental health problems early on. However, this data is notoriously messy, and analysing it usually requires piecing together several specialist tools.
RISE UP brings everything into one place: cleaning raw data, grouping people by their activity patterns, predicting risk, and explaining results clearly. Alongside familiar statistics, RISE UP gives researchers easy access to state-of-the-art AI built specifically to make sense of this complex data.
VOICES
Voluntary organisations are often the first places children and young people turn to for mental health support, but their role is not always visible in the information used to plan and fund support. The Data Prize gives us the opportunity to change that, identify where gaps remain and help services respond better. This important piece of funding will help us demonstrate the vital contribution voluntary sector services make to early mental health support.
Meg Platt, Deputy CEO, Centre 33
Voluntary and community organisations provide vital early intervention for thousands of children and young people experiencing mental health and wellbeing needs. However the data they collect is scattered across different systems and rarely reflected in the wider picture. This leaves charities, commissioners and researchers with a significant gap in understanding who is being reached and what impact is being made.
VOICES will bring together Centre 33, Blue Smile, Fullscope, commissioners, researchers, data and information-governance experts with young people to create a scalable evidence base for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and strengthening the impact of early intervention for mental health and wellbeing.
What does the Data Prize offer to participants?
The Data Prize provides a combination of innovation funding and tailored support to set teams up for success in developing their tool.
Innovation funding
The six teams selected for the prototype phase each receive up to £100,000 to develop and test their prototypes.
After nine months, three teams will be chosen to receive up to an additional £300,000 each to continue developing their tool or application for a further nine months.
Support to develop the tool or application
Including:
- Group workshops and expert surgeries.
- Team mentoring and tailored support.
- Workshops that guide meaningful integration of lived experience throughout the development process.
- Opportunities to showcase prototypes and gather peer and user feedback through ‘Show and Tell’ sessions.
- Opportunities for connection, collaboration and knowledge sharing with a diverse network of experts across mental health science and related fields.
Building on the success of the inaugural Mental Health Data Prize, we are thrilled to extend our partnership with Social Finance to support teams to develop digital tools utilising existing data. The Data Prize will foster multidisciplinary collaborations and robust, responsible data use in mental health research. We are excited to pave the way for a better understanding of how mental health problems develop, persist and resolve.
Dr Catherine Sebastian, Head of Evidence for Mental Health at Wellcome
Want to know more about the Data Prize?
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And if you want get in touch directly, please email the team at dataprize@socialfinance.org.uk
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