Digital Transformation

Our Journey to Digitally Transformed Care…

Stage 1: Utilising Care Systems

The first step towards digitally-led care is to replace paper records with digital ones, allowing our staff to ‘live in the moment’, rather than the past. This means enabling carers to spend more quality time with residents by recording care given in the moment, freeing them from time-consuming paperwork. It also means compliance managers can monitor standards of care in real-time, increasing our accountability.

At this stage:

Digital systems, such as Person Centred Software, ATLAS medication management and Planday were integrated into the way we do things.
These systems remained separate from one another
Some paper-based systems still existed

Stage 2: Systems that Work Together

In order to transform and personalise care, digital systems need to ‘work together’ to enable holistically informed decisions.

At this stage:

Data was streamed from all our digital systems into a ‘data lake’
Artificial Intelligence ‘learnt’ our data to develop predictive analytics

We have adopted the principle of Real Time Compliance Management to ensure that good standards of care are upheld to benefit our residents across every hour of the day.

Using our data lake, our home managers are supported with compliance dashboards. Data is streamed from all our records systems into a user-friendly dashboard, giving managers and stakeholders a comprehensive view of the standard of care in real-time. We also incorporate qualitative judgements from our expert compliance managers, who visit each home at least once a week, to supplement these quantitative metrics with a human insight.

All our residents’ care records can be accessed in real time by their loved ones through our web app, Care Records Online. This offers real peace of mind when separated by distance.

We have developed our own staff portal to support our care workers. In the staff portal, staff can:

Access and fill out forms
View their allocation before starting each shift. This means that they know who they’re working alongside and which residents they’ll be caring for that day or night. We find this supports our care workers to focus their attention on and build relationships with a small group of residents.

We also have a central Support Centre in Addlestone to:

Provide system support to care staff
Co-ordinate staff recruitment, supervisions & training

Stage 3: Transformed Care

Ultimately, our aim is to radically improve the lived experiences of our residents. To that end, we are currently implementing a third stage of our digital transformation which is twofold…

1. Resident Monitoring Dashboard

In traditional care homes, residents are disturbed during the night during checks to manage incontinence and pressure areas. The night round, as this is called, is by and large unavoidable in traditional social care settings.

However, using remote monitoring technology, we have developed a wellbeing dashboard to end the night round, enabling residents, no matter their care needs, to get a restful and peaceful night’s sleep.

Instead of checking on residents every predefined period of time, night staff can monitor residents from afar and offer assistance only when it’s needed.

Our dashboard shows:

Vital signs (heart rate, breathing rate)- Staff will be know if these measures go outside their personal baselines.
Whether the resident is Awake or Asleep
Bed exiting (whether the resident is in or out of bed) – Staff will know when to assist a resident back to bed, reducing the risk of falling.
Incontinence (whether the resident’s bed is dry, damp or wet) – Staff no longer have to check pads and disturb residents.
Sleep score – We can monitor how long and how well residents are sleeping, enabling us to know where support is needed for better sleep.
CCTV insight *only if expressly consented to by the resident or their Power of Attorney where they do not have capacity – Staff can check CCTV if they think there’s a problem to prevent unnecessary disturbance. CCTV also offers families peace of mind that all care given is recorded.

2. Health Alerts Using Predictive Analytics

We have gone steps further than merely recording care in real time – we now use data from multiple sources to make predictions about our residents’ future wellbeing. These are alerted to our home managers via our Resident Health Alerts dashboard.