How technology is delivering measurable improvements in social care
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The social care function of councils has been all too prominent in the media in the past twelve months; and criticisms have often included a failure to share information effectively. As Kim Thomas finds out, forward-thinking councils are using technology from several sources to alleviate caseloads and meet both the demand for increased efficiency and benchmarks for better social care outcomes.
These are difficult times for the social care sector. While the ageing population is placing heavier demands on an already overstretched service, the sector is coming under closer scrutiny from central government, which wants a more responsive service delivered at a lower cost.
As West Lothian Council has found, however, it is possible to improve efficiency and deliver a better service to the public. The council is saving £3m a year by implementing technology that allows different agencies to work together more effectively.
Meeting the collaboration challenge of multi-agency social care
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The headache facing West Lothian was that all the agencies involved in delivering social care used their own software applications. None of the agencies could see what care an individual was receiving from the others, so they were unable to communicate with each other about how to make sure the best care was being provided. “We had an imperative from the government to produce single, shared assessments of residents’ needs, but no way to implement it,” says Grahame Blair, Head of Social Policy for the West Lothian Council.
This meant huge inefficiencies in managing individual cases. A paediatrician investigating a possible victim of child abuse had no immediate access to the police or social work files that would help the investigation: instead, they would have to spend time phoning around the other agencies to talk to the right individual. When agencies did meet, they often had different sets of information and would spend the first half of the meeting synchronising their case notes.
The first application created by West Lothian, eCare, enables agencies to share information securely. eCare, which uses MultiVue technology from Microsoft Gold Partner VisionWare, brings together data from social work, health and housing agencies. A second application, C-me, integrates information from the Council’s social work, education, and health systems to support children’s services.
Employees at the agencies use the same applications as before, meaning lengthy retraining has been avoided. Now, however, they can send messages securely to personnel at other agencies, and receive notifications when information on a resident in their own system is updated in another system. C-me allows users to see a chronology of significant events, referrals, and assessment history for each case.
Driving efficiencies while improving quality of life
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The result has been a dramatic improvement in efficiency, as staff no longer need to spend significant amounts of time getting up to speed on a case. “The time spent synchronising facts and information in case conferences has been cut in half, enabling us to start by immediately discussing the case,” says Dr Helen Hammond, a consultant paediatrician in West Lothian.
But the service to residents has improved too, says Blair: “Because agency personnel finally have a whole view of the people they’re serving, and because they can more easily and quickly coordinate services among agencies, they can do their jobs better and add to the quality of life of the people of West Lothian.”
Better co-ordination with other agencies is not the only way to create efficiencies. When someone is applying for a social care programme, they have to go through a time-consuming assessment. But what if the applicant (or a relative of the applicant) could carry out the assessment themselves?
CareDirector: Moving assessment online
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CareDirector, a product from CareWorks based on the Microsoft Dynamics platform, makes that possible. A web-based interface enables different agencies to share information, but also allows potential clients to enter information about their circumstances, their requirements and their financial situation, and receive an automatic calculation of what they may be entitled to. “What that then does is trigger the process whereby a care manager will verify that information, and bring somebody into the process,” says CareWorks managing director Michael Dolan.
Once the applicant’s information is on the system, they will be able to follow the progress of their application, explains Elizabeth Bielby of Microsoft: “Social services can start an electronic dialogue with the potential client all the way through to being an accepted client. The client can see all the information they’ve input and they can see it supplemented with the information the case worker is collecting. And we also show an electronic diary, which is the first step towards helping them manage the care delivery in a shared way.”
For social services, it means that care workers’ time can be deployed more effectively, says Dolan: “People are more engaged in decision-making than data recording.” Also, he adds, it offers a better service to the customer and meets the objective in the government’s ‘Putting People First’ initiative to offer personalised services in social care: “By making CareDirector as simple as possible, what we’re looking to do is encourage the public to do as much interacting online as possible. We’ve spent a lot of time looking at usability and accessibility, meaning that all client groups can access it.”
“Social services can start an electronic dialogue with the potential client all the way through to being an accepted client, and the client can see all the information they’ve input and they can see it supplemented with the information the case worker is collecting.”
Elizabeth Bielby
Microsoft
Technology in the community
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CareDirector also addresses another major inefficiency. Care workers spend a good deal of time visiting clients on site, taking notes on paper and then taking them back to the office, where they are either entered into a computer or left in paper-based filing systems. This either involves duplication of effort (and a possible introduction of errors), or the creation of paper silos, making it harder to retrieve the relevant information.
Because CareDirector can be accessed from a mobile device, such as a PDA, care workers can enter information directly into the software system from the customer site, without taking paper notes first. As Dolan says: “CareDirector will allow staff to work on the move, so even a saving of half-an-hour or an hour a day will deliver very significant benefits. And it means people will be able to get access to the right information so they can work properly. They don’t have to physically go back to the office to update their records, and they don’t have to go searching for records because something is offline, in the client’s house, or in a paper file.” This is one of the features that particularly attracted Medway Council, which has just become the first UK council to implement CareDirector.
As all case information is held electronically, CareDirector also enables users to create automated reports on the progress of particular cases and whether targets are being met. Because CareDirector is built on Microsoft products, it is simple to install, tailor and migrate data: the Medway implementation was carried out in under six months. The inherent flexibility further brings further savings, says Dolan: “Because it’s easier to build interfaces, easier to generate reports, easier to change and modify the system, your IT and running costs are going to be lower.”
“People will be able to get access to the right information so they can work properly. They don’t have to physically go back to the office to update their records, and they don’t have to go searching for records because something is offline, in the client’s house, or in a paper file.”
Michael Dolan
CareWorks
Kim Thomas is a freelance journalist, who specialises in writing about technology, business and education. Her clients include the Financial Times, the Economist Intelligence Unit and The Guardian as well as a number of B2B publications.