Making the most of the tech opportunity in social care

Lianne Hawkins of Looking Local and Taffy Gatawa of everyLIFE Technologies discuss tech for self-service, prevention and efficient reporting in social care and how councils and providers should approach adoption.

Kirklees Council were prompted to develop an online self-assessment process for financial support requests when increasing demand following the Care Act left their existing 100-days-to-process service unable to cope.

80% of requests are now completed online (including by the very elderly), 18% by phone - using the same process, but mediated - and only 2% now require a home visit.

Time and money saved all round is significant, and developers Looking Local (co-owned by Kirklees Council) are supporting a new collaboration by Kent, Stockton and Nottinghamshire Councils to take forward an online care needs assessment project. The project has been submitted for funding from the new Local Digital Fund.

EveryLife Technologies’ Pass System is a digital tool and platform that replaces the paperwork involved in managing people’s care and medication whether they are in residential care home or receiving homecare.

Lianne and Taffy discuss the processes involved in bringing about these innovations, how collaboration – council to council or council with providers - works, the constraints of traditional procurement methods, and the need to engage care workers in both design and implementation of new technologies.

Key technologies in the pipeline include sensors for prediction and picking up unknown issues, and voice recognition, which could dramatically cut the time and cost of recording information about care visits, and as well as enabling the cared-for to provide feedback.

This content is brought to you free of charge through the generous support of everyLIFE Technologies

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On 6th February 2019 we will be making five programmes about 'smart lives' in front of a studio audience. You could be in front of the camera or in our expert audience.

Our smart lives are no longer connected to place. We carry This Smart Life with us everywhere we go and overlapping coverage allows ever more ubiquitous connectivity. We no longer notice or count the spaces where we can connect, we only notice when connection is poor or when we cannot connect at all. This Smart Life is a whole new world. Programmes will be online from 11 February, and will also be available as podcasts.

10.15 - Coffee and Registration

11:00-11:40 – Smart Ubiquity
An end to commuting and to traffic congestion; work as state of mind not a place of labour; the future of private car ownership if there is one; my data total recall, voice bidable things; identity and personal security.

12:00-12:40 – Health & wellbeing – a smart approach
Wearable monitoring/diagnosis/treatment. Predictive analytics for healthier populations. The Caring Home. Self-management of wellbeing

13:00-13:40 – Data and security
Getting buy in from the public, standards in public cyber behaviour, empowering the citizen, the well-warned society, data-literate management and workforces

14:00-14:40 – The DroneZone - City Airspace Management
This programme is being sponsored by Dedrone, with guest panelists Amit Samani of Dedrone and Elaine Whyte of PwC. Further details on content will be published in due course.

15:00-15:40 - This Smart Life - Round Table
Five guests and our host discuss and respond to what they have heard during the day

All this takes place at 58 Victoria Embankment (the NESTA building) two minutes walk from London Blackfriars Station. Cameras are rolling by 10.30am and it's all over bar the handshakes by 4.00pm. Lunch and refreshments? Of course. But let’s be frank, it’s the quality of the brain food not the sandwiches that make this the single most useful ticket for those shaping the future of UK local public services.

An Audience with CLGdotTV is now running ten times a year. We invite a studio audience of around 50 to join us to make five CLGdotTV programmes. There are no power-points and the questions and interventions from the floor are valued as much as the panellists' contributions.

Some guests stay with us for just one programme and some stay for the lot. It’s a logistical nightmare but somehow we make it work. Each programme is broadcast on CLGdotTV. Plus we edit a 30-40 minute video summary of the day’s conversations with clips from all the debates.

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