How can AI and smart tech tools enable social care practitioners to spend more time with people who require their support?
What is the challenge?
As part of their role, social care practitioners undertake crucial tasks, outside of just working with people who need care and support . In these tasks, whether it is writing case summaries or reviewing data from diverse external and internal sources, practitioners divert time from spending it on delivering quality care services to people in need. The enabling services for social care practitioners, meanwhile, are also required to perform a number of time-intensive tasks.
A wide range of AI and smart tech solutions can support social care practitioners by automating administrative tasks or making non-care-delivery tasks more efficient, allowing them to prioritise delivering quality care service.
Who has designed the challenge?
Why does this challenge matter?
Social care practitioners are trained to deliver quality care services and are passionate about caring for others. However, in the face of budget cuts, resource constraints and increasing demand, waiting times for people who require support from social care services has increased. Using AI and smart tech solutions to ensure tasks outside of delivering face-to-face care, support or advice are completed as efficiently and optimally as possible will create more capacity for supporting people.
AI and smart tech solutions can also gather real-time behaviour patterns and insights on people who require support from social care, allowing for more preventative interventions, increases in the efficiency of the triaging process and optimised care brokerage.
Finally, based on data captured by solutions, social care, multi-disciplinary and partner organisations may be able to make data-backed decisions on a variety of areas, including case allocation based on individual’s needs and the capacity of practitioners, thereby improving the experiences of users of social care services
What are the considerations and constraints?
The professional registration of care practitioners is reliant on accurate and complete record keeping, placing emphasis on the need for tools to be highly reliable.
Councils and some end-users may need particular support during implementation of solution, especially given the time and resource constraints practitioners are under.
To ensure interoperability, assurance and accountability of solutions, robust data governance and management is especially important.
Data managed is likely to be high-risk (e.g., health data) so data security is critical.
Who are the end users?
Social care practitioners and enabling officers: Practitioners will be empowered to use their time to provide the care they want to offer and enabling services (like business support, finance, etc.) to make more informed decisions.
Service users and carers: Reductions in waitlists and more bespoke care will support people who draw on social care support.
Care brokerage teams: With time saved from greater task efficiency and better insights, care brokerage teams can more proactively support people they work on behalf of.
How is it being tackled now?
Many councils have explored using generative AI for reducing administrative burden in social care for tasks such as note-taking and case summaries, with training given on effective prompt engineering as well.
Councils have experienced a lack of resources and time for experimentation for more novel use cases especially relating to triaging of information from diverse data systems.
A number of councils have to employ manual processes for the processes of delivering care, including processing of information using simple spreadsheets.
More specific challenges to consider
How can AI and smart technology:
- reduce the administrative burden on adult and child social work practitioners
- streamline the assessment process to reduce waiting lists
- help practitioners generate accurate, real-time case summaries
- provide concise information drawn from several internal and external data systems as part of a duty or triage approach to allocating cases to practitioners
- improve the timeliness, safety, and accuracy of support for people at the point of discharge from hospital
- map budgetary spend against Social Work team performance indicators, in real time, and improve the understanding of senior leaders of how the current level of resourcing
- automate complex rotas and scheduling to remove the manual burden without the loss of personalisation and maintain safeguarding
- improve the efficiency of the care planning and review process
- anticipate when there are opportunities for earlier intervention
- support practitioners with the management of care coordination and caseloads
- support the assessment process, reducing the administration burden when multiple agencies are contributing to an assessment.
Start-ups that pitched for the social care practitioners challenge statement
Emma AI is an AI-driven intelligent monitoring system with three main products. Emma Core is a conversational interface app to support frontline care teams with organisation and person specific data that is kept within digital products. Emma Analytics analyses historic care delivery to flag changes in care needs or concerns. Emma Generation can train a Generative AI model with organisation and person specific data to be able to generate AI Care Act assessments Quality Assurance Reports etc.
Lilli provides proactive lifestyle monitoring technology to the health and social care sector. Deployed into the homes of people receiving or in need of care. Lilli’s smart, non-intrusive, sensor-based technology provides a detailed view of the patterns of behaviour in the home needed to undertake an assessment of care needs. Lilli supports and empowers care providers to quickly and accurately assess care needs evidenced-based decisions in real-time, accelerating assessments and reablement, reducing hospital visits and admissions, and speeding up discharge.
Starlight has a comprehensive suite of smart tools that transform how social care practitioners work, automating the heavy administrative burden that holds them back. The platform streamlines processes from intelligent referral triaging and case allocation to automated record-keeping and real-time analytics. By handling the time-consuming paperwork, Starlight lets practitioners focus on what they do best – changing lives.
The LGA maintains vendor neutrality. This initiative aims to assist the sector with the responsible and secure implementation of AI and smart technology solutions. Vendors presented were assessed and pre-selected ahead of the event. This event does not guarantee business for vendors or providers, nor are councils obligated to procure any presented solutions. Councils may, however, choose to commission a solution through proper procurement channels following the Showcase.