6 minute read
The next generation of care management
iESE is now in the development stage of building a new Case Management System (CMS) which has the potential to revolutionise how social workers keep and use client records.
A reimagined innovative CMS which is currently being designed and built by iESE aims to give access to real time information from multiple stakeholders, including the recipient of care, allowing social workers to make more informed decisions and spend less time inputting data and more time with their clients.
By taking on this challenge, iESE is entering a market dominated by a few key players. Working extensively with industry technology providers and local government during the past year, iESE has clearly understood the issues faced with the current systems and what needs to change and how. It is now about to start building the system which it hopes will revolutionise care management.
"The current CMS market is dominated by a few players. Prices are very high, they are not very innovative and the records generated are not much better than the manilla folder that used to sit on the side in the home of the recipient of care that the social worker would pick up and make notes in,” explained Dr Andrew Larner, Chief Executive at iESE.
As well as lowering the costs for local authority and providing a more intuitive CMS, iESE wants the database to be able to pull in information from different stakeholders and providers to give a complete and real-time picture of the client. The nature of care is changing with more use being made of predictive analytics and the Internet of Things, such as sensors within the home and wearable devices. By having this data linking into a CMS it could be possible in the future to predict a fall, for example, rather than waiting for the event to be reported and providing aftercare.
“We want to flip it around into what decision do you make and who do you involve if it looks like someone is presenting a need – you shouldn’t just record it, you should do something about it, and so all of a sudden the CMS is part of decision making rather than a record keeping system,” explained Dr Larner.
The product, which will be native in the cloud and fully secure, is now in the first design stage with a provisional plan to start testing with a few agreed local authority partners by March 2022. It is hoped the product will be commercially available by the middle of next year. iESE plans to make the interfaces to the new platform publicly available which will mean competitors can also adopt the standards. As a not-for-profit, iESE feels this would be a win for the sector and this approach will also mean technology providers will have a standard interface which they can build into their design and not have to spend vast amounts of money trying to interface with legacy systems.
Jill Thorburn, Director at Mind Of My Own, a company which provides apps allowing young people to interact with their care providers, has been involved with the design phase of the CMS. “Our services are currently more joined up than our systems and everybody I talk to wants integrated systems. Services are being held back by systems that aren’t modern and aren’t talking to each other,” she explained. “I am excited to be involved with the work iESE is doing because there is an opportunity to completely disrupt how things are done and we absolutely should be doing that. It is time someone did something different and it is time someone listened to the users much more."
David MacFarlane, Transformation Project Manager at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, who was previously a social worker, has also been involved in the system design. He is excited and optimistic about the work iESE is doing.
“I was a children and families social worker for just under five years and now work as a project manager trying to best solve the issue of how difficult it is to get good practice done on behalf of people who really need support. What I found is that we would spend about 80 per cent of our time at our desks and about 20 per cent of our time doing face-toface work in the community. We would be pushing and pulling data through quite old and clunky systems, often for the sake of process rather than to aid a person. There is always going to be some recording but listening to people and understanding their needs ought not to be relegated to second place.”
As part of the system design, iESE will be creating a set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to allow data push and pull requests to happen automatically by allowing two applications to talk to each other.
“If you are working in children and families social work you are often on the phone or email trying to get data from education providers, courts, the police or others, because none of the systems currently communicate with each other. When it comes to integration, the integration we are most excited about is simply the ability for our own internal systems to communicate with each other, for example I wouldn’t need to call the hospital to ask for all sorts of complicated information about someone being discharged, because it is just all there in front of me,” he explained.
It is also envisaged that the new CMS will allow the client to have input into their own records, which would be a welcome change in MacFarlane’s opinion. “If you look at social work research, particularly in the last few years, you will see that the more empowered an individual feels to be able to run their own life and their own social work intervention, the more likely it is to have a positive and lasting outcome. The evidence also shows that this ‘Fort Knox’ system we have created, which locks people out of knowing their own data and what professionals are writing about them, also doesn’t support the kind of change that we believe children and families should enjoy.”
MacFarlane is keen to encourage other local authorities to get behind iESE and the new CMS.
• Find out more about the CMS solution by emailing Sherif directly at sherif.attia@iese.org.uk or go to www.iese.org.uk/social-care-casemanagement-system
