About Us
The Graham Care Group provides care and support for over 500 residents in Surrey and Kent, offering purpose-built nursing homes and care suites.
Using ourselves as a use case, we are aptly positioned to know the challenges social care providers face and how digitisation can transform care in real life.
Graham Care Digital is the product of a digital transformation journey consisting of multiple stages and iterations.
Our Journey to Digitally Transformed Care…
Stage 1: Utilising Care Systems
The first step towards digitally-led care is to replace paper records with digital ones, allowing our staff to ‘live in the moment’, rather than the past. This means enabling carers to spend more quality time with residents by recording care given in the moment, freeing them from time-consuming paperwork. It also means compliance managers can monitor standards of care in real-time, increasing our accountability.
At this stage:
- Digital systems, such as Person Centred Software, ATLAS medication management and Planday were integrated into the way we do things.
- These systems remained separate from one another
- Some paper-based systems still existed
Stage 2: Systems that Work Together
In order to transform and personalise care, digital systems need to ‘work together’ to enable holistically informed decisions.
At this stage:
- Data was streamed from all our digital systems into a ‘data lake’
- Artificial Intelligence ‘learnt’ our data to develop predictive analytics
- Real-Time Compliance Management
We have adopted the principle of Real Time Compliance Management to ensure that good standards of care are upheld to benefit our residents across every hour of the day.
Using our data lake, our home managers are supported with compliance dashboards. Data is streamed from all our records systems into a user-friendly dashboard, giving managers and stakeholders a comprehensive view of the standard of care in real-time.
We also incorporate qualitative judgements from our expert compliance managers, who visit each home at least once a week, to supplement these quantitative metrics with a human insight.
All our residents’ care records can be accessed in real time by their loved ones through our web app, Care Records Online. This offers real peace of mind when separated by distance.
We have developed our own staff portal to support our care workers. In the staff portal, staff can:
- Access and fill out forms
- View their allocation before starting each shift. This means that they know who they’re working alongside and which residents they’ll be caring for that day or night. We find this supports our care workers to focus their attention on and build relationships with a small group of residents.
We also have a central Support Centre in Addlestone to:
- Provide system support to care staff
- Co-ordinate staff recruitment, supervisions & training
Stage 3: Transformed Care
Ultimately, our aim is to radically improve the lived experiences of our residents. To that end, we are currently implementing a third stage of our digital transformation which is twofold…
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Resident Monitoring Dashboard
In traditional care homes, residents are disturbed during the night during checks to manage incontinence and pressure areas. The night round, as this is called, is by and large unavoidable in traditional social care settings.
However, using remote monitoring technology, we have developed a wellbeing dashboard to end the night round, enabling residents, no matter their care needs, to get a restful and peaceful night’s sleep.
Instead of checking on residents every predefined period of time, night staff can monitor residents from afar and offer assistance only when it’s needed.
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Health Alerts Using Predictive Analytics
We have gone steps further than merely recording care in real time – we now use data from multiple sources to make predictions about our residents’ future wellbeing. These are alerted to our home managers via our Resident Health Alerts dashboard.
Alerts include:
- Problems with eating
- Signs of confusion
- Pain increase
- Falls risk
- Mental health risks
- Irregular cardiac activity
- Infection risk