Orli Health

The company

Orli Health is a digital health startup co-founded by Euan Bell and Mark Cox, an NHS frontline doctor, with a mission to support families navigating the challenges of children's behavioural timely and effective behavioural health resources, Orli Health sought to bridge this gap by creating a system that connects families with the support they need.

To further this mission, Orli Health collaborated with the National Innovation Centre for Data (NICD) as part of an Innovate UK grant. This partnership aimed to develop an intelligent recommendation system to improve access to local behavioural health services, particularly in Sunderland—one of the most underserved areas in the UK for behavioural health support.

The challenge

The behavioural health crisis among children has been exacerbated by limited access to timely professional care. In Sunderland, the average wait time for children’s behavioural health services is around 147 days, significantly impacting families needing immediate support. Compounding this issue, many parents struggle to navigate available resources due to systemic complexity and low accessibility.

Orli Health wanted a service and resource recommendation system for children’s behavioural health. They aimed to match user input data—focusing initially on parents providing information about their child’s behavioural health—to relevant resources from the Orli Health database. The final system output would include the recommended resources along with automatically generated explanations supporting the recommendations and a summary of the parent’s input.

Orli Health's broader vision is to simplify access to behavioural health support through digital tools. As demand for children's behavioural health services continues to grow, placing immense strain on systems like the NHS and CAMHS, Orli Health seeks to offer early intervention solutions. Their platform includes clinician-led webinars, drop-in sessions, and community support groups, with the recommendation system—OrliRECOMMEND—serving as a key component to guide families toward appropriate support while awaiting professional services.

The collaboration with NICD

NICD worked closely with Orli Health through a Discovery Project to design and implement a tailored recommendation system. Through a series of workshops, data exploration sessions, and iterative development, the team created a solution that:

Developed an AI-Powered Recommendation Engine: Using machine learning, the system analysed parental input to suggest relevant services.
Ensured Interpretability and Customisation: The recommendation system used filtering techniques and similarity scoring methods such as cosine similarity, Jaccard similarity, and overlap score to match children’s needs with appropriate services.
Generated AI-Driven Summaries: A Large Language Model was used to generate explanations for recommended resources and supportive summaries of user-provided information.
Integrated with Orli Health’s Digital Platform: The system was deployed in Microsoft Azure, ensuring scalability and integration with Orli Health’s existing web application.

One of the key strengths of the project was the hands-on collaboration between NICD’s data scientists and Orli Health’s team. As Euan Bell noted:

"Partnering with NICD has been a game-changer for Orli Health. Their expertise allowed us to take an idea and transform it into a working system that will continue to evolve and benefit families across the UK. The team shared our vision and provided valuable expertise in building a recommendation system that directly impacts families in need."

Results and key learnings

The project successfully delivered its intended outputs within the grant period, implementing and equipping Orli Health with a robust AI-driven recommendation tool. Parents using the platform reported discovering services they hadn’t previously known about, increasing their access to support.

However, the project also surfaced valuable insights:

Engagement Barriers: Despite the improved accessibility, many parents still found it challenging to take the next step and engage with recommended services.
Need for Child-Centred Solutions: To enhance impact, Orli Health identified the need for a child-facing app—gamifying emotional regulation techniques to help children better manage their behavioural health.
Scalability Considerations: While initially developed for Sunderland, the recommendation system has the potential to be expanded across the UK, pending further development and investment.

Dr Antonia Kontaratou, a key NICD data scientist on the project, highlighted the importance of these learnings:

"Working with the Orli Health team on the recommendation system project for behavioural health recommendations was a valuable experience. I found the field particularly interesting, as it combines technology with meaningful social impact, helping to improve outcomes in behavioural health support that many young people struggle with."

Dr Georgia Atkinson, another key NICD data scientist working on this project, added:

"It was nice to work in a field that has good social impact on a community. It was clear that the Orli Health team are passionate about their business and want to support children and young adults with their behavioural health needs.”

Next steps

The success of this project has paved the way for Orli Health to secure additional funding, including a £60,000 investment through Bethnal Green Ventures. This funding will allow them to:

Enhance the AI-driven recommendation system to improve user personalisation.
Develop a child-facing app featuring interactive avatars and sensory games.
Expand accessibility features to help parents directly engage with services instead of merely being signposted to them.

Orli Health is now exploring opportunities to extend its work across the North East and beyond, ensuring that more families benefit from streamlined access to behavioural health support.

Final thoughts

The collaboration between Orli Health and NICD exemplifies the power of data-driven solutions in addressing real-world challenges. By leveraging NICD’s expertise in AI and data science, Orli Health has taken a significant step toward reshaping the landscape of children's behavioural health support.

As a direct result of this intervention, Orli Health now has an implemented, minimal viable product (MVP) of a modularised recommendation system that is flexible, scalable, and ready for further development. During this Discovery Project, due to the type of work developed and carried out with NICD, our technical team provided some essential knowledge transfer to the Orli Health team to ensure that they can in future maintain and expand this system, integrating new features as their platform evolves.

“Our goal was to ensure that the system provided truly valuable recommendations, and we're thrilled to see that Orli Health will be working to evolve the solution further.”

Dr Antonia Kontaratou, Data Scientist, National Innovation Centre for Data

“Seeing the potential for data science and AI to improve real lives is what makes these collaborations so exciting.”

Dr Georgia Atkinson, Data Scientist, National Innovation Centre for Data

As Orli Health continues to build on this foundation, their work stands as a testament to the potential of technology in transforming behavioural health care for children and families across the UK.

“With NICD's support and technical expertise we were able to build and test an innovative solution to a very complex problem. This has allowed us to continue to grow as a business and support more families access behavioural health services/support.”

Euan Bell, Co-Founder, Orli Health