From Uspace to a Connected Learning Mental Health Ecosystem: U-INSPIRE and O-INSPIRE Are Now Live

A major milestone has been reached for the U-INSPIRE/O-INSPIRE research program: real-world research data collection is now underway across both inpatient and outpatient mental healthcare settings in Sydney.

Following Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) approval in November 2025 and completion of the St Vincent's institutional research governance process, U-INSPIRE has formally commenced prospective research data collection at Uspace, St Vincent's Private Hospital Sydney , in October 2026.

This follows the August 2026 commencement of O-INSPIRE, the program's outpatient extension, across three specialist clinical locations: Adelaide Street Psychiatric Consulting Rooms in Woollahra , and VisionTMS clinics operating with radiology services at Martin Place and Dee Why .

Together, these developments represent more than the commencement of a research study.

They establish the foundations of a connected clinical and research ecosystem that brings together specialist inpatient psychiatry, private outpatient care, precision neuromodulation, emerging digital therapeutics and longitudinal outcome measurement.

At its centre is MindSkiller, a digital platform helping connect clinical care, research participation, structured assessment and emerging therapeutic technologies across different healthcare settings.

The ambition is to create a continuously learning mental healthcare system — one capable of generating evidence from everyday clinical practice and using that evidence to inform better care.

Watch: O-INSPIRE — The Connected Ecosystem  

The central idea is simple.

A young person's recovery does not stop at the hospital door.

Someone may move from an inpatient admission to outpatient psychiatric treatment, psychological therapy, MRI-guided TMS or other interventions, before returning to university, employment, family relationships and everyday life.

Yet our understanding of treatment outcomes has often been fragmented across individual services and episodes of care.

We want to understand the trajectory — not just the treatment episode.

And we want to learn how clinical expertise, emerging technologies and coordinated research can help improve that journey.

From research approval to real-world implementation

The U-INSPIRE research program received ethical and scientific approval from the South Western Sydney Local Health District HREC on 19 November 2025.

During 2026, the research framework expanded beyond the inpatient setting.

On 4 August 2026, HREC approval was granted for three outpatient clinical locations, allowing O-INSPIRE data collection to commence.

In October 2026, completion of the St Vincent's institutional research governance pathway enabled formal prospective data collection to begin at Uspace.

These milestones bring together four clinical locations within an approved research framework.

U-INSPIRE provides the inpatient research foundation.

O-INSPIRE extends the research into outpatient treatment and follow-up.

Together, they create opportunities to study how young adults engage with treatment, respond to different interventions and progress across clinical settings and over time.

What makes U-INSPIRE/O-INSPIRE different?

The distinctive contribution of this program is not any single treatment, technology or research method.

It is the convergence of five important developments:

1. Continuity of care and longitudinal measurement across inpatient and outpatient settings.

2. Digital research infrastructure connecting different parts of the private healthcare sector.

3. The inclusion of 16–17-year-olds within the original ethically approved research framework, addressing an important gap in psychiatric research.

4. An emerging ecosystem of precision neuromodulation, AI-supported psychological interventions, virtual reality and other therapeutic technologies.

5. A continuously learning model in which real-world clinical experience can inform research, service development and future treatment.

These elements are interconnected.

The clinical ecosystem creates opportunities to deliver more integrated and personalised care. The research ecosystem creates opportunities to understand, evaluate and improve that care.

MindSkiller provides an important digital connection between them.

1. Following the person, not the building

One of the most important features of O-INSPIRE is its ability to examine treatment journeys across different clinical environments.

Uspace provides specialist inpatient mental healthcare for young adults with complex and frequently overlapping psychiatric conditions.

The outpatient network extends into private psychiatric consulting rooms and specialist TMS services integrated with radiology facilities.

A patient may receive one component of care during an inpatient admission, continue treatment at an outpatient clinic and undergo further assessment or follow-up after returning to everyday life.

Traditionally, these stages may be documented in separate clinical systems, with limited opportunities to examine the entire journey as a connected sequence.

U-INSPIRE/O-INSPIRE aims to help address that fragmentation.

The research follows the patient's clinical pathway rather than being defined by the walls of a particular institution.

The objective is not simply to determine whether someone improved during treatment.

It is to ask what happened afterwards.

Did improvements persist?

Did functioning improve alongside symptoms?

Was the person able to return to education, employment or meaningful relationships?

What happened when treatments were combined, adjusted or delivered across different settings?

And what can we learn from people whose recovery was slower, incomplete or interrupted?

For consenting participants, longitudinal follow-up at three and twelve months can help examine these questions.

This is particularly important in young adult psychiatry, where meaningful recovery involves far more than changes in symptom scores.

We need to understand not only whether treatment helps, but whether those improvements translate into sustained changes in people's lives.

2. Enabling research across the private healthcare sector

One of the most distinctive aspects of U-INSPIRE/O-INSPIRE is its demonstration of how a digital platform can help enable coordinated research across private healthcare.

Clinical research infrastructure has traditionally been more readily available within universities, public hospitals and established research institutions.

Private healthcare providers may deliver sophisticated specialist treatments, but often operate across separate organisations, locations, information systems and governance arrangements.

This fragmentation can make systematic outcome measurement and coordinated research difficult.

MindSkiller is helping address this challenge by providing a shared digital infrastructure that can support research across otherwise separate private healthcare services.

The U-INSPIRE/O-INSPIRE network brings together three different types of clinical environment:

• Private inpatient psychiatry: Uspace at St Vincent's Private Hospital Sydney.

• Private outpatient psychiatric practice: Adelaide Street Psychiatric Consulting Rooms, Woollahra.

• Specialist neuromodulation within radiology settings: VisionTMS services at Martin Place and Dee Why.

Each setting has different clinical workflows, organisational responsibilities and treatment capabilities.

Yet through an appropriately governed digital research framework, these environments can contribute to a more connected understanding of patient experiences, treatment pathways and clinical outcomes.

The significance extends beyond the four participating locations.

This model demonstrates the potential for digital research infrastructure to support broader networks of private hospitals, consulting rooms, specialist clinics and other healthcare providers.

Rather than requiring every service to establish an entirely separate research infrastructure, a shared platform may make participation in systematic real-world evidence generation more feasible.

The longer-term opportunity is to help transform private healthcare from a collection of relatively disconnected clinical services into a network capable of contributing to coordinated research and continuous quality improvement.

3. Including younger patients who are too often excluded from research

Another particularly important aspect of U-INSPIRE is the inclusion of 16–17-year-olds within its original HREC-approved research framework.

Obtaining ethics approval for psychiatric research involving minors requires careful consideration of developmental vulnerability, decision-making capacity, informed consent, parental involvement, privacy and clinical safeguards.

These requirements are essential.

But the resulting challenges can also contribute to a serious evidence gap.

Young people aged 16–17 may fall between paediatric and adult research populations, leaving clinicians with limited evidence about the safety, tolerability and potential benefits of newer psychiatric interventions for this age group.

This is particularly concerning given the increasing demand for specialist mental healthcare among adolescents and young adults.

Many present with complex combinations of depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD, trauma-related symptoms and other difficulties that significantly disrupt education, relationships, family life and development.

At the same time, access to some advanced treatment options is restricted.

For example, Medicare-rebated TMS treatment for depression is not available to patients under 18, creating a further access barrier for younger people who may have exhausted conventional treatment options.

We cannot adequately respond to the growing demand for youth mental healthcare while continuing to leave younger patients underrepresented in the research needed to guide treatment.

The original HREC approval covering 16–17-year-olds therefore represents an important achievement and an opportunity to address this evidence gap, subject to the necessary site-specific authorisations.

The goal is not to assume that emerging interventions are appropriate or effective for every adolescent.

It is to develop the evidence needed to establish which approaches may be useful, for whom, with what safeguards and under what clinical circumstances.

Young people should not be left behind as psychiatric treatment advances.

4. Building a new ecosystem of precision and interventional psychiatry

U-INSPIRE/O-INSPIRE is also closely connected to the development of a broader ecosystem of advanced psychiatric treatment.

An important ambition behind MindSkiller has been to help bring together clinical expertise, precision medicine, emerging digital technologies and adjunctive therapeutic tools within coordinated treatment pathways.

Historically, these innovations have often developed separately.

Neuromodulation, neuroimaging, psychological therapies, virtual reality, digital interventions and outcome measurement may each offer clinical possibilities, but integrating them into practical, personalised treatment pathways presents substantial challenges.

Our approach has been to explore how these capabilities might work together.

MRI-guided neuromodulation

MRI-guided TMS uses individual anatomical information to support more precise localisation and navigation of stimulation targets.

The integration of TMS services with radiology facilities creates opportunities to bring anatomical imaging, neuronavigation and neuromodulation into a coordinated clinical pathway.

The research can examine treatment experiences, tolerability, implementation and outcomes across relevant diagnostic and clinical presentations.

AI-supported psychological interventions

MindSkiller also supports the development of AI-PIT — AI-supported psychological intervention tools designed to complement clinician-directed treatment.

These include:

• AI-ERP: Personalised exposure and response prevention resources, particularly relevant to OCD.

• AI-BEAT: Digitally supported behavioural activation and related psychological strategies.

• AI-REFLECT: Structured therapeutic reflection resources accompanying treatment journeys.

These tools offer opportunities to extend therapeutic engagement beyond the conventional consultation or treatment session.

Their clinical utility, acceptability and appropriate integration require systematic evaluation.

Virtual reality and multisensory approaches

Virtual reality provides further opportunities for immersive psychological interventions, including exposure-based approaches and positive memory enhancement.

Emerging multisensory technologies, including digital olfaction, may offer additional ways to influence immersion, emotional salience and engagement with therapeutic experiences.

These approaches remain exploratory, and their clinical contribution must be established through appropriate evaluation.

Combining treatments around the individual

The objective is not simply to introduce more technologies into psychiatric care.

It is to investigate how different interventions can be selected, combined, sequenced and adapted to the needs of individual patients.

A young person with treatment-resistant depression may follow a different clinical pathway from someone experiencing severe OCD, Tourette's syndrome or overlapping neurodevelopmental and mood difficulties.

Some may require intensive, coordinated intervention. Others may benefit from more gradual, modular or digitally supported treatment.

The research provides an opportunity to learn which approaches are feasible, acceptable and potentially beneficial in real-world clinical practice — including how different components might complement one another.

The integration of these technologies is a clinical development strategy, not evidence that their combination has already demonstrated superior efficacy.

5. Expanding treatment capacity through technology-enabled care

A further ambition is to investigate whether thoughtfully integrated technologies can help address the growing mismatch between demand for specialist psychiatric care and available clinical capacity.

The need for psychiatric assessment and treatment is substantial, particularly among young people with complex conditions who may require prolonged or multidisciplinary intervention.

Specialist clinical resources are finite.

Emerging digital tools may offer opportunities to extend therapeutic engagement between appointments, support structured treatment activities, improve the consistency of outcome measurement and help clinicians make better use of available time.

Immersive and AI-supported interventions may also allow some therapeutic activities to be delivered in more personalised and flexible ways, while remaining subject to appropriate clinical supervision.

However, technology alone does not increase healthcare capacity or improve outcomes.

Its value depends on careful implementation, patient engagement, clinical safety, appropriate governance and evidence of meaningful benefit.

The objective is to augment clinical expertise, not replace it.

U-INSPIRE/O-INSPIRE provides a framework for examining not only clinical outcomes but also feasibility, acceptability, resource requirements and the practical realities of implementing emerging interventions.

This is particularly important if technological innovation is to contribute meaningfully to the accessibility, efficiency and quality of future mental healthcare.

MindSkiller: the digital infrastructure connecting care and research

The platform was developed to support mental-health literacy, digital resources and clinical engagement, but its capabilities have expanded to support structured research workflows.

Within U-INSPIRE/O-INSPIRE, MindSkiller contributes to the digital infrastructure for research participation, consent processes, psychometric assessment, outcome measurement and longitudinal follow-up.

For patients, the aim is to make relevant digital resources and structured assessment more accessible throughout their treatment journey.

For clinicians, the objective is to integrate measurement and digital support into existing workflows without unnecessarily disrupting clinical care.

For researchers, the platform helps create opportunities to collect and connect real-world information over time, subject to the approved research protocol, consent arrangements and privacy safeguards.

This is particularly valuable when treatment occurs across different organisations and clinical settings.

MindSkiller does not replace the clinical judgement of treating professionals or the governance responsibilities of participating healthcare organisations.

Instead, it provides infrastructure through which digital clinical support and research processes can become more coordinated.

The larger ambition is to make systematic research and continuous learning a more accessible part of everyday private psychiatric practice.

From individual treatments to a continuously learning healthcare system

It is to develop a system capable of learning systematically from clinical experience.

The research is naturalistic, observational and mixed-methods.

It examines care delivered within routine clinical practice rather than assigning participants to experimental interventions.

This creates opportunities to investigate feasibility, acceptability, tolerability, clinical outcomes, patient experiences and potential signals of benefit across different treatment pathways.

It also allows the research to reflect the complexity of real-world psychiatric presentations.

Young adults rarely present with neatly isolated diagnoses. Depression may coexist with OCD, ADHD, anxiety, trauma-related difficulties, eating disorders or significant impairment in education and functioning.

Understanding how these overlapping conditions influence treatment selection, engagement and recovery may be just as important as measuring improvement in a single symptom domain.

The ultimate objective is a continuous cycle:

Care → Measurement → Evidence → Learning → Better Care

Each treatment episode remains first and foremost about the individual patient.

But with appropriate consent and research governance, the information generated during that journey can also contribute to a broader understanding of how psychiatric care might be improved.

Over time, this can help identify which approaches deserve further investigation, which treatment pathways may need refinement and where resources could be used more effectively.

Research becomes embedded within care, learning from care and helping inform the next generation of care.

Innovation with responsibility: research embedded in care

There is an important distinction between developing innovative clinical services and establishing evidence that those innovations are effective.

U-INSPIRE/O-INSPIRE is designed to help bridge that gap.

The program does not replace routine clinical care or require patients to undergo experimental treatments simply because they are participating in research.

Clinical decisions remain the responsibility of treating professionals.

Participation in identifiable research data collection is voluntary, and the research operates within approved consent, privacy and governance arrangements.

The purpose is to learn from treatment occurring in real-world clinical practice.

That includes learning from interventions that appear promising, but also from those that are difficult to implement, poorly tolerated or associated with limited improvement.

Innovation should generate questions. Research should help us answer them.

Acknowledgements and thanks

Bringing U-INSPIRE/O-INSPIRE to this milestone has been a journey spanning several years. I would like to acknowledge the individuals, clinical teams and philanthropic organisations whose contributions, encouragement and support have helped transform an ambitious vision into a functioning clinical and research ecosystem.

Dr Stéphane Verhaeghe has worked closely alongside me for the past two and a half years, navigating the considerable work involved in developing the research program and securing the necessary approvals through the Human Research Ethics Committee and St Vincent's Research Office. His dedication, persistence and contribution have been instrumental in bringing the project to this point. I am deeply grateful to the Curran Foundation, whose funding over the past two years has supported his work and made this sustained effort possible.

Professor Vlasios Brakoulias, an associate investigator in the research program, has played an important role in helping me establish the OCD treatment program at Uspace, St Vincent's Private Hospital Sydney. From the outset, an important part of our shared ambition has been to create opportunities for the research and development of translational technologies in the treatment of OCD — bringing advances in neuroscience, neuromodulation and emerging therapeutic approaches into real-world psychiatric practice. I greatly value his expertise, collaboration and commitment to this work.

Dr Michaela Tracey contributed as our research coordinator during the early development of U-INSPIRE, assisting with the initial preparation and application process for HREC approval. Her position was generously funded for one year by the St Vincent's Clinic Foundation, whose support helped establish the research program. I am very grateful for her contribution and for the Foundation's commitment to clinical research and innovation.

I would also like to express my particular appreciation to Matthew Hall, the current General Manager of St Vincent's Private Hospital Sydney, and Heidi Bayliss, the hospital's former CEO.

Their trust, encouragement and confidence in my vision have been especially important. Developing an integrated ecosystem of interventional psychiatry — initially within Uspace, and subsequently extending through collaboration with an external radiology group and my private practice at Adelaide Street Psychiatric Consulting Rooms — has required a willingness to support new approaches to the organisation and delivery of psychiatric care.

Their support has helped create the opportunity to bring together specialist clinical services, emerging technologies and research infrastructure across institutional boundaries.

I would also like to thank Marie Brady and Pesh Moyo, the Nurse Unit Managers at Uspace, together with the entire Uspace nursing team and my fellow Visiting Medical Officers (VMOs). 

Extending the traditional inpatient model of psychiatric care into a hybrid inpatient–outpatient interventional psychiatry model has required considerable adaptation, flexibility and a willingness to embrace new ways of working.

This has involved integrating off-site treatment pathways, advanced neuromodulation and emerging digital interventions with the existing multidisciplinary inpatient program, while progressively incorporating structured research processes and outcome measurement into clinical care.

I am grateful to the nursing team and VMOs for their willingness to engage with this evolving model, accommodate changes to established clinical workflows and contribute to the development of a service that extends beyond the traditional boundaries of inpatient psychiatric treatment.

The evolution of Uspace from a conventional inpatient treatment environment towards a more integrated, research-enabled model of care would not be possible without the involvement of the clinicians and nursing staff delivering that care every day. 

I would also like to express my heartfelt appreciation to Dr Barnabas Bako, radiologist and co-founder of Vision X-Ray Group, for his extraordinary friendship, generosity of spirit and open-mindedness in embracing a vision that brings together our respective expertise in radiology and psychiatry.

Our collaboration has been driven by a shared ambition to advance precision mental healthcare by combining sophisticated neuroimaging, MRI-based neuronavigation and interventional psychiatry within an integrated clinical service.

Together, we have been developing what we believe to be a pioneering, potentially world-first model of MRI-neuronavigated, multimodal TMS treatment for young adults, integrating advanced imaging and precision neuromodulation with personalised psychological and digital therapeutic interventions.

Barnabas's willingness to look beyond the traditional boundaries of radiology, explore new clinical possibilities and contribute his expertise and trust to this collaboration has been fundamental to extending the interventional psychiatry ecosystem beyond Uspace and into the Vision X-Ray Group's clinical facilities.

Our shared objective is not simply to introduce sophisticated technology, but to develop a model capable of delivering high-quality, accessible and affordable precision interventional psychiatric care, while creating opportunities for research, evaluation and ongoing refinement.

I am enormously grateful for his friendship, his vision and his willingness to pursue this ambitious collaboration with me.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the Curran Foundation's foundational contribution of $100,000 approximately five years ago towards establishing the interventional psychiatry program.

That early philanthropic investment was particularly important. It helped create the clinical foundations upon which subsequent developments in advanced psychiatric treatment, technology integration and research have been built.

Together with the Foundation's more recent support for Dr Verhaeghe's research work, it illustrates the importance of sustained philanthropic investment in enabling clinical innovation to develop over time — from an initial concept into a broader program of treatment, collaboration and research.

What began as an ambition to expand the treatment options available to young adults at Uspace has evolved into a much broader collaborative endeavour.

To everyone who has contributed to this journey, thank you. Your support, trust, expertise and willingness to explore new approaches have helped make possible a connected clinical and research ecosystem with the potential to contribute meaningfully to the future of psychiatric care. 

The next chapter in young adult mental healthcare

With U-INSPIRE now formally collecting research data at Uspace and O-INSPIRE operating across three outpatient clinics, the foundations of a connected research ecosystem are in place.

The significance extends beyond the four clinical locations.

The program brings together several ambitions that are too often pursued separately: continuity of care, private-sector research participation, inclusion of younger patients, precision interventional psychiatry, digital therapeutic innovation and systematic longitudinal evaluation.

It also creates opportunities to investigate how emerging technologies might help clinicians respond to the growing complexity and demand for specialist mental healthcare.

These are ambitious goals.

Their success will depend on careful implementation, sustained clinical engagement, rigorous research governance and the quality of the evidence generated over time.

But the opportunity is substantial.

We are beginning to build a model in which the delivery of psychiatric care and the generation of evidence are not separate activities, but interconnected parts of a continuously learning system.

A model that follows patients across clinical settings.

A model that supports the thoughtful integration of established and emerging treatments.

A model that enables private healthcare to contribute more systematically to research.

And a model that seeks to ensure younger patients are not left behind as psychiatric care evolves.

This is the vision behind U-INSPIRE and O-INSPIRE.

Not research sitting beside clinical care.

Research embedded within care, learning from care — and feeding what we learn back into better care.

From care, we generate questions.

From measurement, we generate evidence.

From evidence, we learn how to build better care.

Explore the U-INSPIRE / O-INSPIRE research program

Watch: O-INSPIRE — The Connected Ecosystem 

Watch: U-INSPIRE — Understanding the Real-World Research Program 

Watch: U-INSPIRE — A Guide for Uspace Psychiatrists 

Further research updates, educational resources and findings will be published through MindSkiller as the program develops.

U-INSPIRE/O-INSPIRE is an observational, real-world research program operating under applicable ethics and institutional governance approvals. Research participation is voluntary. The program is designed to generate and investigate hypotheses about feasibility, acceptability, implementation, safety and potential clinical benefit. Research approval does not establish the effectiveness of individual interventions. The inclusion of 16–17-year-olds within the original HREC-approved framework remains subject to applicable site-specific authorisation.