Dr Benjamin I. Perry
Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry
Dr Ben Perry is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Birmingham, and Consultant Psychiatrist in the Birmingham Early Intervention Services.
From research model to regulated device: PsyMetRiC’s next leap
Helping bridge the gap between evidence and implementation, this innovation is enabling earlier intervention for people at risk of poor physical health.
For five years, psychiatrist and researcher Dr Ben Perry refined the science behind PsyMetRiC, a cardio‑metabolic risk prediction tool for young people with psychosis.
There is a critical need for this kind of prediction tool, as people living with mental illness face a significantly elevated risk of physical health issues, dying an average of 15 years sooner than those without. Dr Perry and his team built the web application, assembled the regulatory documentation and plans to maintain regulatory compliance, and published the underlying science. Yet by the end of last year, the project was stuck.
Without formal regulatory registration as a medical device, PsyMetRiC could not be used in routine care. As Dr Perry puts it, without that step “the science, to be honest, is a waste. It just sits in a journal, not doing anything.”
The blockage was structural as much as scientific. “You can't get a tool like PsyMetRiC into safe practice without the necessary regulatory steps, and it is very rare for individuals or research groups to register as medical device manufacturers,” he explains. “The regulatory framework is designed to work best for industry, not really for academia.”
The breakthrough came when University of Birmingham Enterprise agreed that the University would become PsyMetRiC’s registered manufacturer with the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). Without that backing, says Dr Perry, PsyMetRiC “would have just been another publication.”
Regulatory registration was timed to coincide with publication of the core science in The Lancet Psychiatry. Releasing the live web tool on the same day was, in Dr Perry’s words, “a nerve-wracking day”, but the launch has successful. Usage has not only been sustained but has grown to around 4,000 real-world risk consultations performed using PsyMetRiC since March, a number that Dr Perry describes as “phenomenal” given that the tool is designed for a relatively small subset of the population.
The PsyMetRC web tool in action. Use of the tool has grown, with around 4,000 since it's launch in March 2026.
The next step will be scaling and sustainability. PsyMetRiC is being embedded in a new multi-disciplinary preventative cardiometabolic health clinic for young people receiving care in psychosis early intervention services in Birmingham, as a partnership between University of Birmingham and Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, designed as “the perfect platform for clinical trials”. Industry interest is emerging, and the team is working with B13.ai, an external firm specialising in taking health software through to market readiness. This is helping with grant applications and in transitioning from a free web tool to a self-sustaining and growing resource.
The commercial realities have forced a reframing: “someone needs to be the customer,” Dr Perry notes. Patients and clinicians benefit, but to enable self-sustainability PsyMetRiC needs to move beyond reliance on time‑limited grants. Enterprise’s decision to shoulder the role of manufacturer, however, means that now Dr Perry isn’t working through that question in theory, but in the context of a regulated tool that is already being used in practice.