The telecare challenge

Local Authorities, PCTs, Housing Associations and Care Homes should consider a strategic approach to building such a large deployment programme, because delivery of it may not be clear-cut, due to:

• The need to make a clear assessment of a client's alert at a care centre means that the various monitoring devices, including inactivity, need to be integrated for intelligent monitoring, and to provide the ability to predict incidents. False alarms and inappropriate responses are otherwise likely to increase substantially with more deployed devices.
• Maintaining operational effectiveness of all the monitoring equipment from multiple suppliers with suitably trained engineers will become a major burden if several engineers have to visit clients' homes frequently.
• The developing Care Service Improvement Partnerships are tasked with reducing overlap, and increasing inclusiveness of all care service providers. They need to integrate their different care centres for efficient management, while protecting client confidentiality. This increases the scale and complexity of future operations even further.

How BroadCare meets the Telecare challenge
BroadCare provides a packaged solution for the delivery of Telecare which tackles these issues:

• It integrates different manufacturers' monitoring equipment with intelligent software that can be easily tailored to each client's needs, and minimise false alarms.
• Passive cameras monitor for activity or its absence, and can be switched to video conferencing by the client through his TV set, to communicate with his carers, either in the care centre or in the field.
• Using the home TV set rather than a computer enhances client acceptability and social inclusion, while saving costs
• Client lifestyle and monitoring devices are configured and maintained at the care centre for easy management, to minimise administration for the field practitioner and so that engineers rarely have to visit clients
• BroadCare scales up by increasing performance for every client added to a care centre's network, to enable the management of several thousands of clients
• It ensures that legal, regulatory and corporate duties of care relating to the citizen are met.

BroadCare supports the purpose of the CSIPs, which is to:

• Improve the quality of care and social inclusiveness for their clients
• Include the whole community of carers in delivery of improved services
• Contain administrative and care costs

BroadCare is provided as a ready made software solution with a set top box in the home, and a care centre platform that can be easily integrated with any IT system. The 3 part solution (software, care center PCs and servers, with integration and configuration services) is implemented in weeks and, once set up, requires little expertise to run and maintain.

Why invest in BroadCare?
The business benefits are substantial:

• Keeping clients out of hospital, sheltered housing and care homes saves money while enabling clients to live in the comfort of their own homes
• Carers and medical staff can reduce wasted travel time, particularly in widely dispersed populations or congested cities, while spending more time communicating with their clients and responding quicker and better when there is an incident
• Intelligent monitoring and alerting, and the prediction of incidents, reduces emergencies and the costly disruption and management of them
• Enabling maintenance engineers and administrators to configure and support the deployed monitoring equipment at the care centre means saving travel time, better cover for the variety of equipment, less down time, and lower staffing levels than might otherwise be necessary
• Being inclusive of friends, family and key holders should enable Authorities to share the care burden with them.

BroadCare summary
BroadCare allows those responsible for social and health care to take a strategic approach to delivering Telecare. It enables the provision of wider and improved services to their clients, while containing or even reducing costs, and simplifying the management of the growing demands on their services.

For further information, please visit www.mediagrids.com