What social care solutions are there?
Looking specifically at social care, we have an array of social care solutions. Our integrated social care suite is unique in the UK marketplace in that we go to local authorities and provide a suite of products that can help them run their social care services most effectively. Within that suite, there is an array of products that do different things that can all be interconnected and have integrated data, integrated processes and integrated reporting.
Those products include a leading case management system in Access Mosaic commissioning systems to help commissioners carry out commissioning activities like arranging care packages, monitoring service delivery, managing risk, managing quality and value for money through to our Technology Enabled Care suite as well. All of the data can be pulled back into one place to provide a holistic view of the individual and true control for social care departments.
The acceleration of technology development over the last couple of years means that this is also a massive opportunity for those of us in the social care system in the UK to think about AI. Local authorities reported at the end of 2024 that 85% of them, according to the LGA report, are already using or in the process of exploring how they can adopt AI technology to help their service delivery.
Our challenge and our mission at The Access Group is to create a wonderful experience for our users and our customers to exploit this new technology in a really familiar, easy way, but really get the most power and value for it in the way they live and work and carry out their role. At the same time, we're absolutely clear that all AI adoption that we undertake and that our customers undertake must consider the security from a data and personal perspective.
We've established an Ethical AI Guild within The Access Group, led by people with serious experience in this field to make sure all of our AI deployments are signed off by the Ethical AI Guild to ensure that we've considered not only the security implications of what we do, but the ethical implications of what we do. That approach means that we can now go to our customers and say this powerful new technology not only can transform the way you work, but also has considered the implications from a security and ethical perspective. To meet those challenges, and deliver that AI experience, we've invested a very significant amount in our new Access Evo platform.
Access Evo is the platform that includes and embraces that new AI technology to deliver that experience to all of our customers.
That means our new technologies and our new features can be moved onto that platform and all of our Access customers get access to it.
How can we use AI to drive productivity in social care?
So if we know we've got budgetary and workforce challenges within social care, how can we use AI to drive productivity within the staff that we do have to try and get more from the existing people that we employ? And secondly and importantly, how can we then use AI to help those workers be most effective in their role, to make their experience great in a social care role?
As an example, Access NotesCentre, is one of our new EVO platform based products that's allowing social care teams to drive productivity gains within their service. One of the challenges that we recognise with our customers is that social workers can spend up to 60% of their working day writing notes following interactions that they've had. They can go out in the morning, carry out an assessment in someone's home and then come back to the office or their own house and spend the rest of the day writing up those notes and filling out the assessment forms.
That 60%, given the challenges that we face, presents a real opportunity that if we can use AI to help those social workers create those notes and fill out those forms effectively, that can free them up to do more of what they love to do.
Key Guiding Principles that we use when developing Access NotesCentre
- The product must be integrated via Access EVO to all of the other products that are our social workers use.
- The AI must be safe, secure and resilient.
- It must be flexible and scalable.
If you'd like to learn more about our work at The Access Group and how we're bringing AI to the social care sector, please do get in touch.
To learn more about our Local Authority solutions click here.
