Why LifeCare made the decision to switch to Person Centred Software

Head and shoulders above the competition

About LifeCare

Internationally renowned and with over 30 years of experience dedicated to enriching the lives of residents, LifeCare is a family owned, independent group which was established first in New Zealand before opening sites in the UK and is committed to supplying unrivalled and outstanding care and quality of life across all its services. LifeCare currently operates three retirement villages in the UK and two nursing homes, with a third coming soon.

The retirement villages boast luxurious amenities such as a spa and swimming pools, gyms, a cinema room and beauty treatment room, private gardens and grounds, a chef-led restaurant, woodland walks and libraries. LifeCare’s nursing homes also offer 24-hour care, GP visits and access to occupational therapists that are complemented with facilities and services such as sensory gardens, room service, guest apartments, communal gardens and exercise classes to name a few.

Jonathon Leet, Director of Operations at LifeCare, explains why switching to Person Centred Software was the natural next step in their growth journey

When I came over from New Zealand to oversee the development of LifeCare’s first UK site in 2014, one of the first things we had to do was find a digital care planning system. LifeCare’s goal with both retirement villages and care homes is to provide a full continuum of care, so naturally we wanted to ensure that we were harnessing the latest technology available on the market to provide the absolute best care outcomes for residents wherever they are on their journey through care.

When we were searching for the best system to meet our needs, we found that regardless of how many different systems we looked at, none of them ticked every box matching our requirements. We looked at about 15 different possible providers and what we found was some of them were either too clinical and weighed down by unnecessary administrative work or other systems were far too much of a box-ticking exercise without a real sense of engagement in the process of recording a detailed care note that provides useful information. In other words, some did certain things, some did others, usually meeting about 50% of our criteria, but none met every part of our criteria.

This changed, however, when we came across the digital care planning system from Person Centred Software (PCS), which is now known as mCare.

After getting the chance to see how the system was being implemented and how the staff were using it, we were sold! Person Centred Software’s product offered everything we were looking for in a digital care planning system, so we decided to implement it at LifeCare’s first new build site, and London's very first luxury retirement village, Battersea Place, from the get-go.

Immediately, we were able to see the impact and the difference it was making. For example, with Grove Place, which is another of our retirement villages with a nursing home soon to be built too, there were challenges because of the sheer size of the site. Very often we would experience connectivity issues due to the lack of Wi-Fi in certain places, but despite this, mCare has worked perfectly because of its ability to be operated offline and then synced in real-time once internet is available, so in this sense we now have complete continuity of information and data coming into the system at all times of the day.

Why we chose Person Centred Software over other systems

While Grove Place and Battersea Place were able to provide outstanding care outcomes thanks to mCare, our other site, Somerleigh Court, was working fairly independently from the rest of the group, and as such they opted for a different digital care planning system. However, there were always challenges with this system because its functionality was less user-friendly, as was the ability to capture and analyse data, and generally the ability for the staff to navigate the system was not where we wanted it to be.

When comparing the systems, we found that mCare was head and shoulders above our previous system because it enabled us to have a far greater ability to capture care notes in real-time, and the way the system is laid out means that it is incredibly easy to find and analyse the data we need to provide truly person-centred care, not to mention the fact that our nursing staff preferred the clinical aspects of the system.

So, after the success of mCare in our other sites, we decided that the natural next step in our growth trajectory, and to achieve much greater control and consistency, was to increase our partnership with Person Centred Software and roll out mCare at Somerleigh Court. In addition to the advantages that mCare offered, it also made more sense to have everyone on the same system because our other two sites were already using mCare. Having everyone on the same system means we have, for example, standardised risk assessments, standardised clinical assessments, more connected reporting and oversight of our different operations.

Somerleigh Court

Somerleigh Court

How did you find making the switch to Person Centred Software?

During the implementation process, I found PCS to be nothing short of outstanding. From every member of staff that attended the training sessions, I heard nothing but positive feedback about the trainers.

Staff very often commented that the trainers were engaging and training sessions were always undertaken at the appropriate level for the audience. And even though there were some minor operational challenges, which is always to be expected regardless of how good a system is, the implementation of mCare happened as seamlessly as could be expected.

“Person Centred Software is our everything”

While we’ve seen other systems try to incorporate several different elements into their development models, often they end up including a bit of everything but never truly excelling at any one thing. But with Person Centred Software’s mCare, we found an all-encompassing system that actually achieves its goals and does everything you want it to do as a care management system.

A partner to grow with – The Connected Care Platform

What also makes Person Centred Software a much better partner for us is the sheer number of integrated products that make up the Connected Care Platform. While we found that mCare was far better for us when it came to implementing a digital care planning system, having access to other products such as the Wellbeing & Activities Platform as well as ATLAS eMAR means that our vision of a full continuum of care extends to the digital tools and solutions we use to provide that care.

Person Centred Software have often said that their goal is to grow with us as a partner, not just a provider, and in practice I have had the opportunity to see that with the Connected Care Platform, which provides solutions for every different aspect of care management, they are following through with that promise and achieving that goal. In the past we have found ourselves often dealing with disparate strands of software that don’t really connect properly with one another, where nothing talks to each other, and where double entries and admin-heavy tasks often take up a huge amount of time. But now PCS has become our everything.

The features that make Person Centred Software an all-encompassing solution

One of the biggest factors in deciding to move away from our previous software was that we wanted a system that could do everything we wanted it to do; the features of mCare provide solutions to every conceivable issue or challenge that could arise in the provision of care.

However, if I had to pick one feature above all else that I think swayed our decision, it was the fact that mCare was and is the most clinically sound system on the market. Everything just seems to make sense when you use it because the resident journey flows in a very logical way, which is a huge benefit to care staff. For example, when someone is admitted you do the risk assessments first followed by the care plan and then you do your reviews, and even just the process of moving someone through that system was so much more seamless than anything else we’d seen on the market – there was nothing that even come close to mCare.

One of the biggest selling points for us was the use of the Icon-Driven Interface because it not only allowed care staff to record care notes quickly and accurately, but it was also a huge benefit to staff for whom English might not have been their first language or those who struggled writing in long sentences. Having the clickable icons in the system meant that we were getting a far greater amount of evidence of interaction than I think we would have been able to record otherwise.

From my perspective, all of the integrations in mCare have been enormously helpful in providing a full continuum of care for us – for example we’ve found GP Connect to be so helpful in that it helps us share and view GP records quickly and efficiently in a way that was never possible before, but one other feature that really stands out for me, quite simply, is the design.

Before we had mCare at Somerleigh Court, we’d often find with their previous system, that an admission and getting all the documentation in place to process an admission could sometimes take upwards of a month. This was largely because we found ourselves having to write the same information in a number of different places – for example we would have to write largely the same information in a resident profile, then a care plan, then in an assessment. Whereas because with mCare, every part of the system talks to each other, that process goes from over a month to about a week.

Jonathon Leet, Director of Operations at LifeCare offers advice for care providers who are looking to go digital or switch to PCS

In my view, whenever someone asks me for some advice on the process of either going digital or switching to a different system, I always say the same thing: you’ve just got to commit to it!

I think that it’s often the case that too many providers try and hold a difficult balance between running a digital care planning system and still having some elements of their operations that are being done on paper. They might have some lingering folders hidden away somewhere in the offices that they still rely on. But I’d say you just have to commit, you must be all in, and drive that ethos that everything has to be done electronically because when and if care providers do go digital, no matter how daunting or challenging it might seem, and understandably so, the difference it makes to the ability to provide outstanding care outcomes is just night and day.

No matter how difficult you think the transition might be, I promise you it’s worth it. Once you just commit to the new system, things will become much easier; until you finally decide to step off the ledge, as it were, it will feel harder than it actually is.

For us, the ethos has been just that: we are committed to everything being done through Person Centred Software’s Connected Care Platform.

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With Person Centred Software's mCare, we found an all-encompassing system that actually achieves its goals and does everything you want it to do as a care management system.

Jonathon Leet
Director of Operations, LifeCare