Nourish Care provides an all-encompassing digital care tech solution to the nation’s providers, right from the largest groups to independent homes.
Here, chief executive officer Nuno Almeida gives CHP his thoughts on the future of the supplier, the government and health and social care in the UK.
How does Nourish set itself apart from other care management software?
Nourish has created a framework to support medium to large care providers in making the most of digital in the context of larger initiatives of care improvement.
We think we have the best product in the market. What makes the difference is our understanding of how a good digital product – with the right integrations, data science, sector knowledge, when all brought together – can translate into better outcomes for people needing care. We can do this from a single care home to hundreds of locations with a variety of types of care.
In addition to enabling a care provider to improve at scale, Nourish can personalise the care for each end-user – meaning people get care that is relevant to them.
Tell me about the history of Nourish, how it’s developed in that time and lessons you’ve learnt working with providers.
Nourish has been a journey of patient innovation. Although we continuously developed our product for over 10 years, and feel confident in it, we have always known our place; we have always approached providers with support, ready to help regardless of whether a care provider is ready to buy or not.
We have also witnessed products being adopted that resulted in point solutions. We didn’t want to create more work, or introduce duplications in the context of care provision, so we had to take the transformation of how each care worker views their job, the transformation of a single care service, and the transformation of groups of services, with the day-to-day challenges, with the medium-term trends of changes of needs of the people we support, and the evolving needs of care teams and providers – such as collaboration with NHS services, and the interoperability required to support the flow of information for people in care.
This requires a patient approach to growth, a constant reminder of why we do what we do – while building a team that brings together skills and expertise in care quality, management, product design, software development and information security, focussing on quality at every step.
We take a similar approach to our relationships with care providers and partners, including investors. It is important that we get to know each other, have a sense of common purpose and shared values – a belief that focusing on the person we support is what makes a difference.
I took inspiration from how care providers operate – good providers are clear about their purpose and have an alignment of purpose across all decision-makers within an organisation. I aspire to something similar at Nourish, ensuring our services always cause everyone – the person, their care teams and families – to have a more fulfilled life.
What will providers want from their care management software 10 years from now?
It’s hard to tell with so much potential and disruption like AI, VR voice-activated and internet-of-things devices. I hope providers want systems that support care provision, while getting out of the way of the human interaction.
Care management software in 10 years will enable care teams to focus on what’s important for the person, and it will make the job of the care team not just possible, but enjoyable. Although we are likely to use more technology, products that win the preference of providers are the ones that reduce friction between carers and residents, while enabling seamless transfers of information with other parts of the healthcare system.
Tell me about CASPA and its aims.
The health sector has received continued government support and think tank input to guide NHS digital transformation.
Social care had no such backing. NHS Digital was supporting a few projects, but with little impact and little communication with providers. Others such as TechUK or the TSA have historically focussed on technology used in care commissioning, shaping the vision for what good looks like to local authorities; whereas care providers, who deliver over 85% of support in the UK, were at risk of getting the byproducts of the digital transformation workstreams in the NHS and local authorities.
Digital transformation in all these organisations has a real potential of flooding care teams with repetitive, admin-heavy requests for information returns, over and above those they had to do before.
The Care Software Providers Association plugs this gap, with three goals: facilitating collaboration between competing digital care tech suppliers, enabling agreements to be reached about standards and interoperability with the NHS; defining what is possible, avoiding the need for budgets usually associated with healthcare IT, driving rational behaviours; and bringing care providers to the discussion, delivering information to support providers.
In the last four years CASPA has achieved a lot: from data standards to the implementation of frameworks for the sharing of GP records with care providers, the ongoing engagement with care provider associations, and the creation of the North Star for Digital Transformation, which aims to coordinate decisions so digital transformation doesn’t burden care providers and remains focussed on delivering positive outcomes for care recipients.
There has been talk about a National Care Service being implemented if Labour is elected. What are your thoughts on this?
Many of the sector’s problems stem from two structural weaknesses.
First, the commissioning structure: the relationships between the Department for Health and Social Care and local authorities. It’s a large-budget item for most local authorities, which have to raise council tax to sustain care, but with the current structure the NHS always has a much stronger voice and higher parity of esteem.
Second, this leads onto the lack of public awareness for what social care is and how it contributes to society. Despite it being so critical, at any given time it affects a small percentage of the general population, and the NHS gets the credit for being our safety net when we are unwell. The creation of an umbrella brand to bring together commissioners, other budget-holders and private care providers has the potential to mobilise the creation of a shared purpose and raise the profile of the sector in the eyes of the public.
As Labour refines its views on how this could work, it’s important that we bring people with lived experience to the design of such services. We have demonstrated again and again that services like these only become effective if the people they are meant to serve are listened to. It’s also important that the implementation of the concept gains the buy-in from care providers. It is clear that a publicly-provided service would be unsustainably expensive, hence we expect Labour to work with the care provider landscape to define how an umbrella brand and a set of principles for collaboration can bring private, not-for-profit and public entities together as partners to deliver care that is effective, affordable and sustainable.
What are Nourish’s long-term business plans?
We want to challenge the limits of what digital platforms can achieve for care teams and end-users. We play a role that is more holistic, for instance in understanding and collaborating with care providers in reflecting their vision and values on care, and how digital supports their differentiation agenda.
We also play a role in prevention. There is a clear role for digital platforms to help people achieve outcomes that are important to them – through early interventions, self-management, support and coordination in the community, or better experience of life in a care home, retaining choice and control.
There is a lot of work to do to achieve these changes, but our clients are aligned with these ambitions.
Increasingly I feel responsibility to share the significant lessons from rolling out digital transformation across social care with the NHS, paving the way for a more collaborative integration across both sectors.
We will play a role in achieving this, and remain excited by what this means for each care recipient: more control, more choice and better continuity on their journeys through the touchpoints they have with services across both systems.
How does Nourish make sure its product is just as catered to a large group as it is to an independent home?
We focus on each end-user. Digital empowers teams to provide the best care to each person, while giving transparency to registered managers makes for more empowered carers and better informed, more responsive teams, which in turn gives transparency to registered managers. This chain of impact works no matter the size of the business.
There are services we provide that lead to great outcomes at all scales, such as the discovery stage we run with larger providers, which aims to understand what is unique about an organisation, which challenges they face, the maturity of care planning and quality monitoring practices. We learn the vision of the CEO and what keeps them awake at night. We also work with providers to learn about the people they support, which type of care they provide and more.
We then shape our product, establishing how care planning processes need to run across different types of care, and Nourish becomes their version of Nourish, based on best practice for each domain of care but configured to the specific organisation.
Training with Nourish and our customer support is available to all users of our product around the clock, working when care teams work.
We work with management to analyse data and extract insights that support the strategy of providers. Our smaller clients benefit from our understanding of what best practice looks like; all this experience is available through the best practice libraries in our product, our training and customer support services. We focus on the version of our product that will allow them to be most effective in delivering outcomes for end-users.
Nourish sponsored Care Home Professional‘s Top 10 Biggest UK Care Groups feature in this month’s edition of the magazine. Read more below:
