Exceptional care means more than looking after people in the here and now. It means planning ahead to introduce the latest techniques and technologies that will future-proof client care and provide our clients with first-class support for years to come. 

Apollo Care Liverpool strives to stay on top of cutting-edge care trends. 

Over the next few months, we’re introducing a suite of apps and integrations to keep our home care service at the forefront of the industry. 

This article explores how these innovations will help us provide the quality care you and your loved ones deserve.

 

Nourish 

By the end of 2024, Apollo Care Liverpool will store all our care plans and risk assessments in Nourish – a new all-in-one digital care platform. 

The Nourish platform will allow our clients and their families to access care notes through the app. They’ll also be able to see how their care package is performing.

From personalised profiles and care and support plans to visibility of an individual’s goals, preferences, and priorities, the detail captured in Nourish is easy to view and actionable for the whole team at the point of care. 

No more delivering care on a one-size-fits-all basis.

With flexible in-app reports, dashboards and customisable permissions, our managers will have better visibility into their care service than ever before. 

Managers can track and monitor trends and changes in those they support at an individual and group level to make sure we provide our clients with the best care. 

 

Nourish will help us: 

• Deliver contextual care plans
• Flag and address issues if clients don’t complete specific tasks with their carers.
• Provide a digital emergency pack for all service users, which they can download and send to any service they’re admitted to (e.g. hospital)
• Customise client interactions and monitor their timeline
• Improve skin integrity and wound management services
• Keep up to date with our client’s hourly, daily, and weekly activity 
• Create detailed Risk Assessments.

More about Nourish.

PainChek is the world’s first regulatory-cleared medical device for pain assessment. 

The device empowers our carers to harness the power of medical technology to deliver the highest standard of care. 

PainChek’s universal solution allows us to assess those who can’t reliably self-report their pain, those who can reliably self-report and those who fluctuate between the two. 

Why use PainChek? 

Accurate and consistent pain assessment is challenging at the best of times. Assessing the pain of someone who’s living with cognitive impairment or dementia and who may not be able to verbalise their pain is extremely difficult. 

The PainChek assessment scale is the new standard in observational pain assessment. It gives a voice to people who cannot articulate their pain. 

Using AI technology to support a modern assessment framework, Painchek will identify the presence of pain even when it’s not apparent. It will quantify the severity of pain and track the effectiveness of interventions through analytics, ongoing reporting and continuous monitoring. 

A PainChek assessment covers six domains spanning a range of pain indicators we can conduct at rest or after movement. 

The first domain is the face, which we’ll objectively assess using PainChek’s AI technology. The tech will identify and automatically document the presence of up to nine facial micro-expressions which indicate pain. 

Then, Painchek will guide our assessor to review and select the pain-related features across five further domains, including: 

• Voice
• Movement
• Behaviour 
• Recent activity
• The body 

 

Once complete, PainChek summarises these features into an overall pain severity rating – from no pain to moderate or severe. The app then documents ratings with a time and date stamp for ease of reference. 

But technology still needs our input. That’s why it’s vital we conduct regular pain assessments by asking how much pain someone is in. PainChek has incorporated a numerical rating scale (NRS) into the app to support this. 

From a clinical perspective, the PainChek NRS works seamlessly with analytics – allowing us to track the effectiveness of interventions and trends in pain levels over time.

For many people, cognitive state and the ability to reliably report pain will fluctuate hour to hour, day by day. In these cases, our team will select the best assessment tool at the point of care.

 

How PainChek works

PainChek is built around an open Application Programming Interface (API), allowing it to integrate with our existing clinical systems. The app’s two-way integrations mean it can receive information from our clinical system and send back pain assessments.

PainChek is a genuine point-of-care assessment tool that gives carers more time to care and enables best-practice pain management for our clients. 

Apollo Care Liverpool directors, John and Zara, witnessed the app in action during the Nourish conference earlier this year. Both were impressed with its capabilities and the benefits it will bring our clients. 

We aim to implement PainChek early in 2025. 

Discover more here. 

Around the same time we launch PainChek, Apollo Care Liverpool will introduce our GP Connect integration. 

GP Connect will allow our authorised office staff to access their clients’ GP records so we can: 

• view a client’s care record and related documents
• update a client’s care record and related documents
• manage a client’s appointments

 

GP Connect integration will provide access to real-time information and a clear picture of our clients’ historical care. The time saved by having this accessibility will benefit not only our carers and clients but also GPs, as we’ll no longer need to call them for updates or information.

Plans are in place for our clients to access GP Connect, too, allowing them to:

• view their care record, appointments and prescriptions
• request permission to view all of the above, if not already granted

 

Please note, GP Connect is a national service that’s integrated with all major GP software providers. It routes requests to the appropriate GP system based on the patient’s registered GP.

It does not store any GP, patient or care provider data – it merely enables interconnectivity between authorised and approved systems.

Find out more.

 

Please get in touch. 

 

Apollo Care Liverpool offers support in the following areas. 

 

Aintree, Aintree Village, Fazakerley, Orrell Park, Walton, Clubmoor, Croxteth, Gillmoss, Norris Green, West Derby, Old Swan, Stoneycroft, Tuebrook, Broadgreen, Dovecot, Knotty Ash, Page Moss, Stockbridge Village, City Centre, Bootle, Huyton, Anfield, Walton.