CareCubed supports collaborative working

iESE’s tool CareCubed is continuously evolving to add greater functionality and to support collaborative working for its ever-growing user base. Here we outline some key recent updates.

CareCubed is the market-leading care tool offering a transparent solution to help local authorities, Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG) and care providers agree the cost and scope of care packages.

There are secure online versions of the tool for both the children’s and adult market and iESE is committed to ongoing development of these products to ensure that they stay current with changes in the market and emerging policy and practice.

Bearing in mind the place-based agenda, iESE has recently launched a place-based CareCubed licence to facilitate collaboration between local authority, CCG partners and care provider partners by giving them secure managed access to share cases. Vanda Leary, Digital Lead at iESE, said: “The place-based module is now live and that gives real opportunities for local authorities to work with their partners, knowing that they are working from the same information in a streamlined way, and keeping the needs of the individual at the heart of all their work together.

CCGs can benefit just as much as their local authority partners in using CareCubed. Although they are typically commissioning fewer care placements, those placements are often very high cost. iESE is also seeing an increase in the number of care providers using CareCubed. They value CareCubed’s clear, structured approach as an independent and well-established model to support negotiation on value for money and sustainability of the care market.

As well as the place-based module, recent major enhancements to CareCubed include:

• Expanded supported living case options to better align CareCubed with activity within the sector, bringing a wider range of cases within CareCubed’s scope.

• Enhanced reporting and dashboard features to provide at-a-glance management information.

• Digital assistant help features to facilitate rapid and effective on-boarding of new users.

Join the CareCubed Community

As a not-for-profit, one of iESE’s missions is to create opportunities for knowledge-sharing and cross-collaboration within local authorities. One way it is fulfilling this ethos is with the recently launched CareCubed Community, which already has more than 100 members and is rapidly growing. Every CareCubed user has an automatic invitation.

“We would encourage CareCubed users to join when they receive their invitation, ” stressed Leary, “What members will get is access to CareCubed resources, shared documents, videos and, most importantly, the ability to directly reach out to other users to ask questions, get advice and to share experience. We are seeing from the posts within the community forums and from the feedback we are getting that it is useful to have this peer-to-peer support. ”

iESE-hosted CareCubed user forums have been taking place online monthly, with presentations and opportunity for questions and discussions. Recent sessions have included previews of upcoming CareCubed releases, as well as case study presentations from CareCubed users.

As conferences start to resume face-to-face operation, iESE is presenting CareCubed and looks forward to interacting with current and new customers. In September and November iESE will be presenting workshops at The National Commissioning and Contracting Training Conferences (NCCTC) Children’s and Adult events. The September workshop will look at negotiation skills, whilst the November one will include a presentation from CareCubed user Essex County Council. Both workshops are designed to be of interest to all commissioners, whether or not they are CareCubed users.

Older persons care is expected to be the subject of the next major CareCubed update and iESE has been recently carrying out some research in this area.

We are doing ongoing research on how best to expand CareCubed to cover aspects of older persons care and CCG placements for people with complex health needs. We know we have customers who are already successfully using CareCubed for aspects of older persons care and we are confident that we can widen CareCubed’s use in this area for greater benefit to our customers

There have recently been several new CareCubed case studies added to the database, including one on how The London Borough of Hackney is using CareCubed for commissioning children’s care.

Access CareCubed case studies on the iESE website: www.iese.org.uk/project/carecubed/ • Find out more about the NCCTC events here: www.ncctc.co.uk

• For a demonstration of the CareCubed tool, please get in touch with us directly at carecubed@iese.org.uk