We are just scratching the surface – Systems in Care

Care Homes are fast paced environments, where the absolute priority is providing residents with the best care possible. The sector itself is one in which innovation is encouraged in many forms and best practice is shared so others are also able to benefit.???

In recent years we have started to see a change of mindset in the way the majority of the Adult Social Care Sector views the role of systems within their organisations. A significant driver for this shift in thinking was the Coronavirus pandemic. This was a time when social distancing, strained team levels and lockdown measures caused chaos with the manual processes the sector previously had grown used to.

Systems and technology showed us that by digitising some of our processes, we could create a ‘new normal’, which brought along some unexpected benefits.?Digitising Social Care continues to be a focus in 2023. The Governments Adult Social Care Reform whitepaper published in December 2021 outlined that only 40% of social care providers use fully digital workflows and records. As such the government has set a target for at least 80% of providers to have digitised care records in place by March 2024.

In general, systems and technology are always getting better, cheaper and more user friendly which as a result means they are much easier to access. In our sector, care management, eMAR, rostering/time and attendance, CRM, resident management, fall detection and remote monitoring systems are the talk of the day and rightly so.

These systems ease the burden of manual processes, duplication of work and allow us to effectively capture and analyse data.?However, I feel that we are still at the start of the digital transformation journey in the Adult Social Care Sector.

The point I am trying to make is that we are only scratching the surface.

The general outcome we want from implementing systems as care providers is to improve the quality of care we provide to our residents. We have seen the introduction of AI-powered virtual assistants into our daily lives, allowing us to redefine how we may choose to do simple tasks like controlling the lighting within our homes. What is stopping us from applying similar technologies to our care homes?

Imagine residents being able to open and close the curtains in their rooms by a simple voice command or being able to request a cup of tea from the comfort of their bed. Consider the ease of being able to check what activities are available in the home on any given day by just asking a simple question out loud. The use cases are endless, booking chiropody and hair dressing appointments, video calling family members, being able to view the menu for any particular day are just a few other examples of things Residents could do through a simple voice command.

The way most systems work at the moment is that a team member has to initiate a workflow in a system to ensure data is captured. The beauty of integrated AI-powered virtual assistants is that the resident is actually initiating the data capture.

In a world where data governs all, can you imagine a scenario where a resident requests a sandwich and not only is a delicious club sandwich delivered to their room, but it is also captured on the care planning system and the nutritional content is recorded within the resident’s daily intake.

This process encompasses the integrated use of an AI-powered virtual assistant, menu planning system and a care planning system. If you really wanted to go down the fully integrated rabbit hole, why not sneak a procurement system into the mix to update food inventory after every meal request had been completed by the kitchen team.

Recently we have also seen the emergence of assistive technology to help ease the burden on team by automating the data capture process. Sensor technologies can be implemented to capture resident’s vitals, helping establish a baseline and notifying the care team if there is a deviation from this. Assistive technology has also helped alleviate team challenges for night shifts. The technology has been transformative in capturing data on when a resident turns in bed, so that if a resident has turned in their sleep, then they don’t need to be disturbed during their rest.

At Principle, we are keen to innovate, share our learnings and hopefully aim to become a provider who can share best practice when it comes to systems. To ensure this becomes a reality we have to select the right systems and work with the best system vendors. This will open the doors to having two-way integrations throughout our ecosystem of systems and we feel our knowledge of the sector will benefit both the system vendor as well as our team and residents. Being able to analyse and use the data from these systems to spot trends and baseline outputs will be transformative in ensuring that our ‘new normal’ is making our team and residents feel special every day.?

By Subhaan Iqbal – 1 August 2023