Your therapist may come with an uptime guarantee

A proposed service standard now under discussion by a care-technology standards body would require providers of automated mental health support to publish availability figures in the same format used for payment networks. The headline commitment under discussion is three nines: roughly nine hours a year during which the service would be permitted to be unavailable, ideally not all at once.

The standard would not regulate what the service says. That remains the province of clinical guidelines, ethics boards and several arguments that have not concluded. It would regulate only whether the service says anything at all, which the drafters describe as a lower bar and, in the circumstances, a surprisingly contested one.

Under the proposal, providers would publish a status page. Users would be able to see, in advance, that scheduled maintenance is planned for Tuesday between two and four in the morning — hours chosen because they are quiet for infrastructure teams and, according to one submission to the consultation, not quiet for everybody else.

“We would never describe a session as an incident,” a spokesperson for the standards body would say. “We would describe it as a session. If the session does not happen, that is the incident. We are aware this sounds cold. The alternative was to have no definition at all, which sounded colder.”

The most difficult clause concerns handover. Under the draft, any service that becomes unavailable during an active conversation would be required to route the user to a human within a defined window. Providers would have to demonstrate that such humans exist, are awake, and are contractually reachable — three requirements that submissions to the consultation treat as increasingly optimistic in that order.

Clinicians consulted informally would be expected to raise the obvious worry: that an availability metric measures the wrong thing beautifully. A service can be up for every second of the year and still be useless, and nobody has yet proposed a status page colour for technically responsive, emotionally absent.

The standard would be voluntary at first, as standards are, and then quietly mandatory, as standards become. Its authors insist it is not an endorsement of automated care but an attempt to hold it to the boring commitments that every other critical service already makes. Somebody, they argue, should write down what breaking looks like before it breaks.