A warm welcome to our new partner CareApps!

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We’re delighted to welcome CareApps as a new PRSB partner and look forward to working with their team on standards conformance for their software platform, Empathika. We spoke with them to learn more about their goals and what they hope to achieve through the partnership.

 

Can you tell us a bit about your digital platform and what it aims to achieve?

CareApps Ltd is the developer of Empathika, a digital solution created by providers for providers. Empathika is an innovative care management platform designed to support CQC-registered care providers in delivering safe, effective, and truly person-centred care. We work closely with care teams to streamline daily workflows, enhance communication, and ensure that vital information about people’s care is recorded accurately and shared appropriately.

 

What’s really important for your organisation at this point in time?

Our priority is to empower care providers with intuitive, interoperable digital tools that meet national standards and respond to the real-world needs of frontline care teams. We’re focused on delivering solutions that are easy to use for care workers, while providing peace of mind for management, knowing that as they deliver world-class care, their actions are being properly documented and remain audit-ready for regulators and inspectors. Above all, we’re committed to supporting safe care delivery, improving outcomes, and ensuring that people receiving care remain at the heart of every decision.

 

Why have you chosen to join the Standards Partnership Scheme?

We believe that collaboration is key to driving quality and consistency across health and social care. By joining the PRSB Standards Partnership Scheme, we demonstrate our commitment to adopting and embedding nationally recognised standards that promote better information sharing, safer care, and greater trust in digital records.

 

How do you hope the scheme will help your organisation deliver its goals?

Through this partnership, we aim to align CareApps Ltd products – starting with Empathika –   more closely with best practice in record-keeping and data standards. This alignment will support seamless integration with other systems, promote safer and more coordinated care, and enable care providers to meet regulatory and quality expectations with confidence. It will also help us scale our platform responsibly, build greater trust with users, and continue innovating in ways that genuinely meet the needs of both care professionals and the people they support.

 

Why are standards and interoperability important for you?

Standards and interoperability are the foundations of safe, person-centred, and joined-up care. They allow information to flow securely between professionals and settings, reduce duplication, and ensure that people only need to tell their story once. For us, adopting robust standards is integral to supporting a connected care ecosystem.

 

Looking ahead, are there any PRSB standards for which you intend to be assessed against for conformance?

Yes, we’re particularly keen to demonstrate conformance with the About Me Standard and the Personalised Care and Support Plan Standard, as these align closely with our mission to provide person-centred, up-to-date, and accessible care records that travel with the individual across their care journey.

Adopting these standards will not only strengthen the integrity and consistency of the information shared through Empathika but also support our broader goals of building user trust, scaling responsibly across diverse care settings, and continuously innovating to meet the evolving expectations of regulators, providers, and service users alike.

 

Find out more about Empathika

https://empathika.com/

“At CareApps, we built Empathika — a solution created by providers for providers — because we understand the day-to-day challenges of delivering care. Our goal is simple: to help carers focus on caring, not paperwork. By partnering with PRSB, we’re reinforcing our commitment to safe, standardised, and interoperable care records. We’ve tackled the pain points, but we’re not stopping there — we’ll continue evolving Empathika to meet the changing needs of care teams and the people they support.”

 

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Personalised care and support planning for people with severe mental illness

A review of a sample of current care plans, and the way they have been developed, may be helpful in identifying the priorities for this improvement. The PRSB Implementation Guide provides more detailed explanations about each element of the plan, including advice on how the planning process might be best conducted.
These questions might form a checklist for current plans to be compared with. 

1. Does the plan include an About Me section in which the service user, in their own words, can indicate the information they want to be available about their lives, their values, their interests, and priorities, available for all those who may care for them?
2. Is the approach to developing a care plan patient centred and engaging, allowing plans to be based on patient priorities goals, and aspirations, along with the actions they plan to take and the support that they will receive?
3. Is there space for a “formulation” to be recorded in which the person receiving care and the professionals who provide it, share and record the personal meaning and the origins of the person’s difficulties?
4. Are relevant procedures and therapies recorded?
5. Where relevant, are one or more contingency plans included for anticipatable disruptions, exacerbations, or deterioration, and do they include advice on what to do and points of contact for those called upon to respond?
6. Where relevant are additional supporting plans incorporated, (an example being an “educational and health plan” for someone with a neurodevelopment disorder)
7. Is a version of the plan available to a service user (if they wish to have it) in a form and format that they can understand and find to be of value?
8. How is a version of the plan available to the GP and other key parts of the health and care system?

Work conducted by PRSB and partners recently has looked specifically at the suitability of this approach to the development and documentation of care and support plans for people with Severe Mental Illness. This resulted in an updated version of the standard (v1.4), for use by any service and for any group of service users, but with some modifications to ensure that it meets the needs of this community. The approach to a patient centred process of identifying goals, hopes, and values, and the support needed to achieve them, is fully compatible with and can be conducted using, specific tools in use in mental health, such as DIALOG, DIALOG+, and ReQoL, for example. 

Where analysis indicates the need for improvement in the content and process of personalised care and support planning for patients with Severe Mental Illness, specific improvement projects should be instituted to co-design with service users and their representatives, and the relevant staff groups, new approaches, and documentation that would be of value in delivering improvement. The toolkit includes a range of existing resources that could be used to engage in this improvement work, including signposting to relevant existing approaches informed by patient experience-based design.

Moving to a single holistic plan

A review of a sample of current care plans, and the way they have been developed, may be helpful in identifying the priorities for this improvement. The PRSB Implementation Guide provides A key development, consistent with national policy on support for Personalised Care across all health and care sectors, is the move towards an individual with complex needs having a single, integrated, care plan, rather than a series of plans developed by different parts of the health and social care system in isolation of one another. For a patient with severe mental illness, the related concerns and challenges might form a very prominent part of such an integrated plan; many will also have concurrent health challenges and needs. The intention is that the relevant services work together to plan and wrap support around the patient and their family in an integrated way, rather than as a series of sequential or disconnected encounters in which the service user or their friends and family have to adopt the role of the integrator.

A starting point would be to agree priority groups of service users who may already have more than one care plan because they need care from more than one part of the system of health and social care. This could be initiated by looking at service users registered with some sentinel practices or PCNs. Alternatively, the approach might focus initially on people with defined co-morbidity or risk that entails collaborative care with agencies beyond specialist mental health services.

The focus here is on the process of care planning and agreement on what should be shared, rather than solely on the technology used;

1. What is the process to agree which professional will initiate care planning and act as the “lead point of contact” for the service user?
2. Will initial plans be agreed with the service user in joint consultations or sequentially? Where and how will they be conducted?
3. What will be the process to agree the elements of the plans which should be available to professionals and potential authorised users beyond the immediate care teams, (A&E services, Ambulance Services, Social services, etc.) with the service user’s consent?
4. How will elements of the plan be updated following consultations in a way which is proportionate, to allow contact and progress notes to be maintained by the service conducting the consultation, whilst avoiding unnecessary work for partners in care if there is no significant change to the personalised care and support plan?
5. What are the implications for workload, logistics, and administration arising out of these decisions?

The answers to these questions and others will best be elicited through focused joint working, grounded in real, or at least realistic examples. This will entail process mapping, and co-design with a range of professionals, service users, and families. Resources from the toolkit and outputs from the Simulation element of this project will be valuable. Some organisations would adopt an approach such as a Rapid Process Improvement Workshop, planned over several weeks and conducted over a number of sequential days, to develop prototype ways of working that could be tested in the field.