Chris May
Founder, Director
Mayden
UNITED KINGDOM
Chris May is the Founder and Managing Director of Mayden, a UK-based digital healthcare company. With over 35 years of experience in the health sector, Chris is dedicated to using technology to transform healthcare and improve patient outcomes.
Mayden specialises in designing and building cloud-based systems for healthcare services, both in the UK and internationally. Their flagship product, iaptus, is a leading Electronic Health Record (EHR) system widely used in psychological therapy services. Chris's vision for Mayden is to create data-driven, patient-centred care through innovative software solutions.
Under Chris's leadership, Mayden has fostered an agile and collaborative working culture and co-authored Made Without Managers, which was highly commended in the UK Business Book Awards. His latest book, Data-Driven Healthcare, is due out in January 2026. Chris's ambition is to see technology and data play a crucial role in the continuous improvement of healthcare services.
Imagine a patient comes to see me for the first time. His name is Paul. As a clinician, I will first take down all of Paul's details (assuming I don't have them already) and then conduct a clinical assessment of Paul's situation. What I have at the end of this process is a digital health profile of Paul, and I will then use all my knowledge, skills, training and experience to suggest possible treatments which will lead to the best outcome. What I won't do is find all the other "Pauls" in my clinical database, look at the journeys they have been on - and the outcomes they have achieved - and use this information to suggest the best form of treatment.
From the point of referral to discharge, patients leave a trail of data behind them. Pooling this data creates a mountain of information that shows how a service is performing - and where problems might be occurring. Yet all too often, the outcomes of all this activity are not measured consistently. And patient outcomes may not be recorded at all. Yet the combination of standardised care pathway analysis and outcome measurement provides clinicians with a set of tools to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare systems immeasurably.
This is data-driven healthcare in a nutshell. In 2025, we should be doing this, and we’re not.
In this talk, Chris May demonstrates how the value in this data can be unlocked, providing a wide range of performance metrics and identification of problem areas such as bottlenecks. This analysis can then be used to redeploy resources more efficiently and streamline processes to facilitate service improvement across the care pathway.
Most importantly, the power of data-driven approaches to improve healthcare outcomes is now unprecedented, and in this new era of artificial intelligence, the technical possibilities are readily accessible to all. We just need to get the underlying data consistent, complete and joined up. In healthcare systems which are fragmented, it is difficult to do this, but not impossible. We just need to employ some simple frameworks and be more disciplined.
This presentation then paints a picture of what is possible, bringing together standardised approaches and personalized healthcare into one coherent framework to paint a vision for healthcare in the 21st century, and emphasising that, far from being the Cinderella service it has been historically, mental healthcare is poised to lead the way.