A guest blog from Taffy Gatawa, CICO at everyLIFE Technologies.

Yoga is a practice where improvement is continuous and incremental, and which contributes to a broader goal of wellbeing and betterment. It’s the best way to describe the journey taken by everyLIFE Technologies on the route to PRSB standards conformance. And it’s one upon which all system suppliers across social care should consider embarking.

Before joining PRSB’s Standards Partnership Scheme, we noticed that the market was changing with a new, national focus on integration between health and social care, coupled with an emphasis on digital as the key method for getting us there. Demand was growing for standards to be taken more seriously.

As digital tools become increasingly essential in helping social care adapt to daily challenges, there is a vital need to ensure that information across the sector is collected in a standardised way, so that the quality of the data recorded can be relied upon by care providers and care receivers alike. With consistent information-sharing, professionals can work together across sectoral boundaries and facilitate joined-up care. We realised that, as a supplier, it was not enough to simply send our products out to market; it was now essential that our products conformed with recognised standards before going out to customers to enable this.

As such, we joined PRSB’s Standards Partnership Scheme at the beginning of 2021 and through desktop research, clinical reviews and critical engagement with PRSB and our customers, successfully implemented two standards into our digital products: About Me and the Personalised Care and Support Plan. The conformance process not only benefitted our digital products in ensuring information is consistent across services but also improved our engagement with our care providers and supported them in administering safe, high-quality care.

Over time, we refined our methods based on PRSB and customer feedback and as the process matures, we will continue to reflect on best practice and lessons learned. PRSB standards are available for use on their website so we could have taken the standards directly and implemented them on our own. The benefit of the conformance process however, was that it presented the opportunity for mutual dialogue around the standards and discussion regarding the changes required to facilitate full alignment of the standards with our products. These conversations and reviews ensured that the standards were fully applicable to social care settings and resulted in a solution for social care rather than a health solution made to fit social care.

A significant portion of the conformance process was targeted at refining our digital product but more importantly, we needed to ensure that the product was usable for our care providers and that the standards fit their daily requirements for administering care. The time taken in this regard paid dividends as we were able to engage with our care providers at every step, and they could validate product changes as being compatible with their workflows on the ground. We had the opportunity to raise care providers’ views with PRSB’s clinicians and in turn, this created a new learning experience for us with our customers. It meant customers were able to raise requirements directly with us at the product development level, which in turn informs our future product strategy.

Yoga is not just about building physical skill, but also about improving our lives more broadly.

The same is true of standards. We wanted to implement standards not just to say that we are conformant with them, but to make sure our product meaningfully supports the safe transfer of information that allows our care providers to administer care safely and efficiently.

Since implementing the Personalised Care and Support Plan, our 1,000 care services are all using the standard, the use of the About Me standard is steadily increasing, and our care providers are now reaching out to us to ask for more standards to be implemented into our products. There is no doubt that the development of industry-wide standards will help to create a safer environment for care receivers through the use of digital technologies in care delivery. Not only does this mean greater ease of interoperability between the health and social care sectors but, crucially, it means improved care outcomes at an individual level too, allowing for incremental improvements to future data management.

Allowing for seamless communication between digital systems beyond organisational boundaries, will ensure that interoperability can have a positive and lasting effect on standards of care. With the creation of universal standards, not only will there be a reduction in duplicate data entry, but critical health information will be passed between professionals more quickly, more accurately and more safely, at the care receiver’s point of need. Once implemented, these improvements will very quickly be evident in patient outcomes overall.