Neil Eastwood, Founder, Care Friends
With his employee referral app Care Friends, operated in partnership with Skills for Care, recently winning the UK’s most prestigious innovation award, Neil Eastwood shares his hard-won lessons for harnessing the potential of digital adoption in our sector
There is no shortage of technological innovation on offer to care providers in 2023. New applications are emerging which were unheard of just a few months previously. The current poster child is, of course, ‘A.I.’ (Artificial Intelligence) which you could argue is taking over the mantel from care robots (remember ‘Pepper’?). Chat GPT, the most well-known A.I. product so far, only launched on 30th November 2022. But there is a wealth of novel but unsung technologies mostly made up of rather less newsworthy innovations such as digital care records and everything in between.
The Government has, rightly, thrown its weight and some funding behind pump-priming the take-up of technology across a sector that we all recognise must rapidly change simply to survive, as demand for services from an ageing population increases and the workforce becomes harder and harder to find and retain.
But, as someone who has spent the past five years creating, piloting, launching and then scaling a new technology, in our case to empower more care workers to become recruiters, I have come to understand that realising the benefits of innovation requires more than just a product. It depends as much on the humdrum process of continuously listening to users, constant improvements, change management and a significant investment in product support as it does in a compelling concept.
Perhaps unusually, for someone leading an innovative start-up company, I would put myself at the late adopter end of the technology adoption curve – I like to hear a chorus of enthusiastic recommendations from trusted peers that the water is lovely before I jump in with something very new. I suspect that reflects the views of many readers. Early adopters are thought to make up only about 16% of people. I confess to being inherently cautious when considering investing in new technology solutions for use at Care Friends.
A key concern is always whether or not we have the bandwidth to optimise the benefits of the solution rather, as is often the way with new technology, being wooed by all the amazing features but then only making use of 10% of the platform’s capability. In addition, the Adult Social Care sector has, through years of regulation and inspection, become hard-wired to be risk avoidant. Not the best starting point for innovation.
So, although we are surrounded by a cornucopia of innovations and most acknowledge we must embrace change and quickly, there is a real risk of widespread underachievement if we aren’t careful. A sanguine example of this is Pepper the humanoid robot, which many of you may recall launched to great fanfare in the UK in 2016. Pepper’s offer to our sector was to lead recreational exercise sessions with care home residents, freeing staff to perform other duties. But research found it took time to wheel the robot out and boot it up and in many cases care workers had to be on hand to reinforce the instructions. The lack of practicality and effort of day-to-day use, together with a limited repertoire of activities contributed to a lack of adoption in social care settings and production was halted in 2021.
This risk has been at the forefront of my mind all the way through the journey from launching our very first version 1.0 Care Friends employee referral and reward app in 2018, to now tens of thousands of app users across four countries on the current 3.2.14 version.
People often comment that, viewed as an observer, the rapid growth of the Care Friends app seems effortless, culminating in this year’s King’s Award for Innovation and an upcoming NHS pilot. But it is anything but that. It has been, and continues to be, a relentless cycle of testing, feedback and continuous improvement, setbacks and breakthroughs, all with large investments in support infrastructure and the patient backing of the forward-thinking care providers we partner with (and their employees) whose feedback informs and shapes our product roadmap. This is the necessary journey of embedding innovation widely in any market.
So, whilst we stand on the cusp of an era of exciting digital transformation in Adult Social Care, to harness this potential we must never scrimp on the unglamorous effort of listening to, supporting and learning from our users. Putting them at the centre of our thinking is the true path to unlocking the huge promise of innovation in our sector.
