The social care sector is facing challenges on multiple fronts. Acute staff shortages, matched with increasing demands to improve health and social care integration, mean the industry is being pushed to its limits. Care technology, or 'CareTech', is vital to ensuring the industry can meet the challenges ahead.
Digital care management systems are an exciting sub-sector of this industry. Digital care systems are streamlining processes, improving the quality of care, reducing workloads, driving up staff retention, and enabling carers to spend more time with residents improving health outcomes. They also help to reduce the risks of medication errors, dehydration, and missed visits and can record care data in real-time while improving the access and sharing of resident care data.
Person Centred Software was among the first electronic care systems to integrate with NHS Digital's GP Connect service; for the first time, care providers were able to access, in real-time, the GP records and medical notes of care receivers. To date, we've connected over 22,000 residents to their GP records. We've further developed this functionality by enabling care homes to instantly share information with hospitals and external professionals. We're now working with the NHS to roll this out nationwide.
The future of care technology: predictive models
But there's still more to do. The insatiable rate of technological advancement is reflected in the ever-growing applications of CareTech. Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven technologies are improving the patient experience, assisting the workforce, and helping systems run more efficiently.
AI data processing, for example, offers hope that soon we will have digital systems that can help make informed assessments about a patient's condition and prompt earlier investigation and treatment. They could, for example, predict infections when a patient is otherwise incapacitated with dementia.
The use of digital care software married with 'big data' also offers possibilities. For example, the information generated by the millions of care records captured every day through observational data recorded at the point of care and passive monitoring through technology could enable better care. Monitoring technology is becoming increasingly important in ensuring people are safe and cared for, even when there's no direct human contact.
We've already seen the benefits of having timely access to meaningful data that supports better decision-making and outcomes for those supported in social care settings. Care providers have seen these benefits implemented in the existing generation of digital care records. As a result, we already see a step-change in the industry's readiness to embrace CareTech.
In the future, the norm will be to utilise predictive models that can harness the power of collecting data in volume, allowing early intervention, and reducing the need and reliance on people using health services.
