City & County Healthcare Group Taking Healthcare Digital

TAKING HEALTHCARE DIGITAL

Amanda Hamilton, CIO, City & County Healthcare Group Amanda Hamilton, Chief Information Officer of leading UK health and social care provider City & County Healthcare Group, talks digitisation and data integration in the future of healthcare

Writer: Phoebe Harper Project Manager: Vivek Valmiki

Health tech has such a broad horizon and the potential is unconstrained. The opportunity to use digital platforms, AI, and Big Data is massive and still growing,” opens Amanda Hamilton, Chief Information Officer of City & County Healthcare Group (City & County).

As the UK’s largest care provider, City & County comprise over 200 locations spread across the nation, offering distinct services in Home Care, Complex Care, Extra Care, Learning Disability, Live in Care and Supported Living.

“We provide support for over 25,000 customers and work with many of the local governments and NHS commissioners within the UK,” Hamilton tells us.

Heading up the company’s information division, Hamilton’s interest in tech and computing has shaped her interests from childhood as a self-described “proper nerd”, all the way to her nomination in 2020 as CIO of the Year in the Women in IT Awards.

Indeed, it was the “new frontier” allure of technology in the 1980s that first piqued Hamilton’s interest, a sentiment that remains relevant for her today thanks to the relatively unexplored potential of digital transformation in healthcare.

“The arrival of 5G and commoditised telehealth in the near future makes it an even more exciting space and gives me that same feeling as when I was a kid building my own computers- anything is possible,” she reflects.

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This, combined with the altruistic potential of leveraging technology to improve the lives of others, led Hamilton to her ongoing tenure at City & County today.

“I decided to move into health and social care where I genuinely felt technology could do good things for vulnerable people,” she comments.

A GROWING SERVICE

Our discussion takes place as City & County continue on a growth journey that is evidenced by the company’s significant expansion over the past five years. So much so, that the group has effectively tripled in size during this period.

“City & County now delivers approximately 350,000 hours of care a week into local communities and this translates into over 2.5 million care visits a month.”

Technologically speaking, at the very crux of enabling this expansion, is digital transformation. Yet in such an interpersonal sector as healthcare, people are the true backbone of operations.

“YOU CANNOT EXPECT TO MODERNISE HEALTHCARE IF YOU ARE NOT CAPTURING RELEVANT DATA AT THE COALFACE AND IN THE

CARE DELIVERY CYCLE” - AMANDA HAMILTON, CIO, CITY & COUNTY HEALTHCARE GROUP

CITY & COUNTY HEALTHCARE GROUP – OVERVIEW OF SERVICES

• Elderly care

• Care support for younger adults

• Complex care and live-in services

• Support for disabled children

• Reablement

• Respite care

• Extra care

Total Business Group is a well-renowned Northeast-based supplier of multi-functional office solutions and IT systems. The firm consults, installs, and supports leading-edge managed print services and IT systems for companies of all sizes across the UK.

Through the support of major manufacturers, Total Business Group has developed a great reputation for delivering and installing solutions and services nationwide on time and on budget. Its success is based on three core principles: being experts in operations, providing great value for money and being upfront, honest and transparent in all negotiations. These old-fashioned principles in a modern high-tech world haven’t let the firm down in almost 30 years of trading. The company’s partnership with City & County Healthcare Group began in 2012, upon the acquisition of the South Tyneside-based headquarters of Comfort Call and its multiple offices across the north of England. Comfort Call had been a longstanding client of TBG and then became a flagship addition to the CCH family. Whilst City & County had its own IT team, they were let down regularly by their current array of copier dealers, and soon the fast, efficient service provided by TBG with Toshiba was deemed the way forward. Along with this superior service and support, City & County benefitted greatly from the Toshiba device quality, reliability, efficiency and its standard cutting-edge e-Bridge firmware technology

which allowed for Secure, GDPR complaint scanning and printing across the companies Wide Area Network, from PC, laptops or mobile devices. TBG were asked to replicate this service across the whole of the UK. In support of CCH, the firm have offered an adaptable and responsive service to accommodate their rapidly changing needs, working hand in hand with CCH’s internal IT Teams, configuring equipment, collecting and moving device locations, deploying to Helping your business succeed through technology and unrivalled support new locations following the award of new contracts or acquisitions, no request is too large or small, totalbusiness.co.uk | 0191 490 0822 and all dealt with in an efficient manner to remove the ‘burden of print’ from the IT teams’ remit. All emergency calls logged via the TBG Helpdesk are ticketed immediately and responded to within the agreed SLA’s. Installations and strategic relocations are handled by appointment, usually to coincide with the CCH IT Team being onsite too. This continual partnership during the last nine years, coupled with Toshiba’s award-winning products and the firm’s excellent, personalised service meant Total Business Group is now supporting almost 200 City & County Healthcare Group offices across the UK.

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“At the heart of all of this growth and care delivery is a dedicated team of 20,000 truly wonderful people. This includes our amazing care workers, the local support teams, and our corporate central support functions.

“Regardless of where they are located or what department they are in, all of our teams are passionate about care and focused on improving the lives of our customers,” Hamilton comments.

A particular source of pride for Hamilton is the company’s diversified workforce as a primarily female-led business.

“75-80 percent of our workforce are female and so is 50 percent of our Senior Leadership team,” she tells us. With IT in particular widely acknowledged as a male-dominated realm, Hamilton recognises the laudable transformation in this area that the company has enacted.

“Specifically, my IT team has had an increase in female representation over the last four and a half years from no permanent female IT team members when I arrived, to over 49 percent representation today.

“I am passionate about women in technology and think balanced viewpoints are key to innovation and progress.”

THE MODEL BRANCH PLATFORM

The embodiment of digital transformation at City & County is the company’s programme - ‘The Model Branch.’ The Model Branch has been developed over the past three years and offers a set of digital tools designed to streamline care management administration processes, whilst improving the working lives of City & County’s teams. The platform gives care workers the means to capture key care information on every single visit, which is then transported in real time to central support and management teams. The Model Branch is set to be integrated at a local government level to effect improved care across communities. “A big ambition of ours is to deliver predictive analysis over the care data we capture and a great example of that is using data learning models to predict support needs. If we have a customer who has shown repeat lead indicators for a specific condition or disease, we should be able to use our real-time data to help predict the oncoming illness and provide preventative care where possible,” adds Hamilton.

For more than a decade, Onecom has worked in partnership with City & County Healthcare Group, providing technology that empowers its teams to provide quality care for vulnerable people in their homes.

The key word here is people – never forgetting that a unique individual is the reason for every visit. As the UK’s largest provider of community-based social and home care services, with 30,000 service users looked after by around 13,000 care workers, it is critical that the Group can provide a personalised service.

At the core of this commitment is City & County’s Model Branch technology, a suite of applications issued to every carer which contains digital care plans for every person they will look after. This includes vital health data such as medication regimes, information about their family, topics they like to talk about, and even how many sugars they like in their tea.

Having access to this information at their fingertips means staff save time that would otherwise be spent reading paper notes and can focus on meaningful interactions.

City & County Healthcare Group needed a technology partner that could be relied upon to provide reliable, secure devices and connectivity to its workforce across the UK.

This had to be achieved against a background of growth that has led to an almost ten-fold rise in mobilised staff numbers which have increased from 1,300 to 12,000 in the last four years.

The Group ruled out a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) approach early on, because of the need for reliability and the compliance requirements of the healthcare sector around patient confidentiality and data security.

Onecom’s solution combines versatile Samsung smartphones – most recently the ruggedised Samsung Galaxy XCover4S and XCover5 models – connected to the Vodafone network. Each device is pre-installed with the SOTI Mobile Device Management platform, enabling remote management of the devices to set up user profiles, ensure appropriate use and keep software up to date.

Amanda Hamilton, Chief Information Officer at City & County Healthcare Group, said: “The quality of care we provide, and our ability to drive better outcomes for the people we care for, are integral parts of the ethos of our business. We needed a provider who could guarantee quality devices on a reliable network and ensure that our carers have connectivity to the critical information they need to deliver quality care.

“Onecom stood out very early on as a partner able to provide us with what others – even very large providers – were not, with direct access to channel pricing, immediate response to kit delivery and provisioning, and device management. It’s not just a supplier relationship – it’s a genuine partnership that is key to the service that we provide.”

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IT STARTS WITH DATA

Digital transformation has an integral role to play in allowing the company to expand its national footprint, as seen by the last five years.

“The digital transformation of our care and management processes allows us to scale our operations quickly and safely, maintaining quality of care as a focus and giving us operational grip across a geographically disperse organisation,” Hamilton explains.

For Hamilton, the digital transformation that she envisions and champions within the UK’s healthcare sector begins with the basics.

“It all starts with digital data capture. “You cannot expect to modernise healthcare if you are not capturing relevant data at the coalface and in the care delivery cycle, but data is only as good as the quality (and often timeliness) of its capture,” she tells us.

A lack of data standards and fragmented systems can complicate this process, hence the need for a simple platform that can be integrated to care systems on a national, and indeed global, level.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how important this kind of data interoperability and the digital transformation of healthcare is for the future of patient outcomes and healthcare crisis management. “The work we have been doing at City & County is certainly aimed at establishing that capability for data capture in the community and turning that information into valuable care insights for our teams and our customers.”

With a robust technological backing, City & County are able to streamline the integration of business acquisitions into their operating processes whilst retaining quality as a core focus.

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We believe in customer intimacy from relationships and knowledge built over time, combined with exceptional, personalised service to enable the successful adoption of relevant technology. We differentiate ourselves by offering a uniquely flexible and agile approach to our customers across Europe and the Middle East (and beyond), with an innovative service led, customer focused business model to support their success.

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“I AM PASSIONATE ABOUT WOMEN IN TECHNOLOGY AND THINK BALANCED VIEW POINTS ARE KEY TO INNOVATION

AND PROGRESS” - AMANDA HAMILTON, CIO, CITY & COUNTY HEALTHCARE GROUP

“The digital platform effectively acts as a standardisation engine that allows us to approach the integration of the acquired business very efficiently,” she comments.

As a highly acquisitive business, City & County has recently expanded their reach, introducing new skills and capabilities to the company’s healthcare family with the purchase of MiHomeCare group, the live-in care business Noble Care and the complex care server Complete Care-Amegreen.

“Moving towards interoperable platforms that allow seamless integration of data will be a huge enabler for integrated care and improved health outcomes.

“Digitising analogue data and processes will unlock modern applications for the management of community and personal health while AI and Big Data can improve decision making and research,” she outlines.

FUTURE HEALTHCARE

In the years ahead, expansion remains firmly at the top of City & County’s agenda, particularly within increasing the reach of the Model Branch programme.

“This year we have set a very aggressive target to convert all of our sites to the new platform by June of 2022, giving us the largest single implementation of digital social care planning in the UK with over 25,000 customers receiving care on our digital platform.

“This type of transformation can be a big challenge for the operational and support teams, and it will be a real achievement if we can complete the programme in that time frame. Our average conversion of sites is about c.35 per year and this new target is over double that number this year,” Hamilton informs us.

The physical acquisition of businesses is also set to continue, complimenting City & County’s existing portfolio. In order to do so, further recruitment is essential.

“Another key priority for our business is a focus on improving our recruitment processes and increasing the capabilities of our learning and development teams. Tel: 0207 1860518 enquiries@candchealthcare.co.uk www.candchealthcare.co.uk

“We will be focused on process improvements this year as well as deploying new digital platforms for learning management and application tracking and employee management.” Hamilton concludes by returning to the all-important people who are at the very heart of City & County – both those who keep the company running, and the patients that they take such pride in caring for.

“We are a people business and mobilising care workers and getting talent into the business in a sustainable way is such an important part of our business plan,” she surmises.

Symbolising the marriage of technology and health in bettering the lives of others, City & County will continue to deliver the future of healthcare across the UK.