Microsoft Partners you Should Know About: Using innovative IoT technology to enhance health and social care with Alcove
As part of an ongoing series that highlights some of the local government innovators across the UK empowering councils and local authorities engage with citizens, Microsoft partner Alcove highlights the work it has been doing to transform health and social care.
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Care is a growth industry – more of us living longer means greater care needs and, assuming current demographic trends continue, a further one million paid care workers will be required in the next decade. While this might be considered good news for the market, the uptake of care work in its current guise is in crisis and certainly not a career of choice. But why is this?
One of the key reasons is pay. The current wage for a care workers is often below minimum wage when taking into account unpaid travelling time between multiple short visits. And this has been decreasing in real terms year on year as budgets are squeezed.
On top of just poor pay, there are other potentially undesirable aspects of the job:
- antisocial hours
- lone working
- lots of responsibility (lives are in your hands)
- physically demanding
- basic or infrequent training (leaving workers ill equipped to deal with often challenging conditions like dementia)
- zero hours contracts (although this is actually attractive to some people)
But for the industry itself, the care profession is also in crisis. As a result of squeezed budgets and time-poor workers, care workers across the UK often end up only equipped to do things unto their charges – washing them, feeding them, moving them etc. rather than doing things WITH their charges. For example, teaching them to adapt to their changing conditions and help them help themselves.
Reablement is a great idea but it rarely takes place in practice, and arguably too late, only after a hospitalisation event has already happened. Self or family-led care and long term condition management is poorly supported; and there is little evidence to support which interventions work better than others.
Investing in the workforce has time and again been shown to have a cost benefit reward. So why isn’t it done more often in this industry?
The care funding crisis means the public sector buyer’s focus is cost biased – a skewed cost quality ratio, with an uplift in investment just unthinkable in a landscape of slashed budgets and increased demand, regardless of the positive longer term impact it could have.
This is a very short-term outlook, leaving providers unable to balance budgets for much beyond the next 2-3 year horizon without more major service cuts. As services falter, risk of litigation increases, and many local authorities will be forced to shift to a direct payment model, where people are left to source help themselves.
Some organisations are now realising that what you put in affects what you get out.
Alcove has been working since 2014 with East Thames Group that now pays all its workers the London Living Wage (when introduced, an increase of 15% in take home pay for some). But many employers or commissioners will balk at such increases. So how can they find a way of creating savings so that investment can be made in the workforce?
At Alcove, we believe useful and scalable technology is the layer that can achieve this. Using innovative digital solutions, health and social care organisations can enhance safeguarding and quality of life, up-skill workers and improve training, deliver better services and staff retention; and, crucially, reduce costs by smarter deployment of labour.
Alcove’s IoT-powered care technology enables care workers to respond to adverse events in near real time, rather than relying on inefficient scheduled checks. Behavioural data analytics help move away from a reactive, call-for-help model towards something a lot more proactive and preventative. In-home data can tell family or formal carers when mobility is declining, people are sleeping badly, not taking their medication or not eating properly (or equally when their conditions start to improve after the right interventions). Support can then be provided on site by a carer, or remotely, where appropriate, using simplified communication aids. Spotting changes early enough can prevent conditions deteriorating and improve outcomes.
Alcove uses a whole suite of off-the-shelf consumer hardware that is adapted so that it requires no behaviour change on the part of the user, or is accessible and easy to use even for groups that have never engaged with smart technology before. It is integrated and aggregated with a bespoke software wrapper that utilises a set of Azure hosted websites written in C# and AngularJS, and backend processing also written in C#. Each individual user has a personalised set of hardware producing the data needed to drive this web-based application, which formal and informal carers alike can have access to, and bespoke SMS / email alerting engine with up to three layers of escalation.
“Using Azure services gave Alcove a head start and enabled us to concentrate on developing software. By using continuous testing and deployment, it was live as soon as it was done. Our day-to-day management tasks have also been kept to a minimum by use of SQL Azure, Web Apps and Service Bus. We have been able to scale to support our clients as demand grows with ease.” Marcus Tillett, CTO, Alcove.
Care is one of the few industries that will never be fully automated (humans are just simply better at doing some things) but technology has a very important role to play in making sure all those that work in care are optimised, monitored, protected and trained. It’s time for a change not a race to the bottom.
Alcove is currently working with a number of local authorities and social housing organisations to help keep people on the cusp of residential care in their own homes, delay entry into the social care system, and prevent hospital readmissions. Get in touch with Alexandra.eavis@youralcove.com to discuss or find out more at www.youralcove.com.
