Good practice:

STOPandGO- Digitising Domiciliary Care

Involvement in the project provided the project team with the opportunity to redesign the model of care to include technology as an integral part of the service. Prior to this contract there was very little technology operating in the sector, with providers adoption of technology limited to electronic staff rostering systems in some of the larger organisations. However, most providers relied on the carer phoning from the service users home to register their presence and be instructed on the tasks to be completed. On leaving they would report what they had done as a paper case note. The case notes were collected weekly/ fortnightly depending on pressures of the service and the actual hours of care delivered then entered into a finance portal of the authority. In reality, it was only when a complaint or query about care was made that the case notes were looked at. Any issues that the individual carer had needed to be raised orally or they were missed.
Liverpool City Council adopted innovation procurement approaches to enable cooperation between care providers and technology companies to deliver an ICT enabled domiciliary care service to improve care outcomes and achieve cost and operational efficiencies.

A open market consultation event was arranged to bring together both technology companies and care providers interested in joining forces to deliver a range of Help to Live at Home Services within the city of Liverpool.

The resources needed are a smart phone for the carer and a tablet for the supervisors; the numbers depend on the size of the company and how many staff they have. The staff need training but there are no extra staff required to introduce digitalising the services.

The customer being made aware of the potential of new technology to address unmet needs.
Technologies are provided by two local SMEs, a large charity, and two companies. In the first phase, digital care records were deployed by home care providers across the City using the PASS System.
The second phase:
• Safe house sensors were deployed in over 2,000 homes across the City,
• The Caring Cloud App was used along with the sensors in a trial by Liverpool City Council.

• Some carers were unwilling to be monitored at the level enabled by PASS.
• The market for technology in this sector is immature, creating issues for SMEs to develop a sustainable business model. This also raises a very real issue in terms of risk for the Council in adopting these solutions.

STOPandGO will provide a new business model to allow public authorities to co-finance innovations. Innovation and adoption was enabled by the requiring technology addressing a genuine need.
• The funding support for technology was non-specific, was not simply co-funding of the technology but of a technology enabled whole service.
• The power of the flexible funding was also that it provided internal leverage to try new approaches.
• The lack of sustainable business plans creates problems of risk for the customer buying new solutions.
• Inter-supply chain brokering, enabled by the Council with technical support for the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) and Innovation Agency, helped care providers see the potential of technology and developers to understand real world problems.
• Despite the success and evaluation in hard financial terms, scaling and replication to other Councils is still difficult as the investment in the infrastructure for the providers (phones, screens etc.)