AI is bringing real opportunity and real risk to social care in equal measure, and poor AI governance is already showing up as a driver of weak CQC ratings. The CQC expects AI to support human decisions rather than replace them and with outputs monitored closely. Care England has already flagged providers using generic AI tools to produce policies and audits disconnected from how the service actually runs, and recent reviews found governance and audit weaknesses behind the vast majority of Requires Improvement and Inadequate ratings. There is a real risk that AI, when used ineffectively and without guardrails, will proliferate this.
AI is a tool, not a badge of honour. We don't believe the measure of good AI is how much of it you use, but what it helps you achieve. In social care, that means helping people deliver better care, reducing risk and improving outcomes for the people they support.
We think about that impact in three stages.
AI is instrumental in helping every care provider write outstanding care plans. Removing the manual workflow around completeness, accuracy and timeliness frees teams to invest their time more strategically, in the people they support rather than the paperwork. Investing in the quality of documentation now is cheaper than dealing with the fallout from an incident later, and that's what good AI products in this space should enable.
Within Log my Care, our AI-powered care plan audits are the evidence of that in practice, continually assessing efficacy and quality across multiple KPIs from care plan completeness to accuracy and timeliness. Further reporting and insights capabilities will shortly be released as we continue working with customers to improve transparency across services, ultimately improving the overall quality of care delivered.
This is how we'll know we've succeeded. AI's role here is to help teams catch what matters sooner. The LeDeR programme, for example, the NHS-commissioned review of deaths among people with a learning disability and autistic people, found that avoidable deaths in this group remain nearly twice as high as in the general population. Better documentation, caught earlier by AI-supported monitoring, is what stands between a near miss and a preventable one, whether that's a choking incident or any other risk that shows up in the notes before it becomes a crisis.
Get the first two right and ratings follow, because evidence of decision making is what inspectors are looking for. We're not chasing the rating directly, it's the natural outcome of better documentation and fewer adverse events.
That evidence depends on one thing Log my Care has put at the heart of all reporting and log creation throughout our systems: structured data. Structured data isn't a prerequisite for LLMs (AI models) to operate, but it's what turns AI outputs into reliable evidence, replacing guesswork with predictability and making the model more precise, efficient and reliable for CQC inspection.
AI is having a profound impact on what’s possible in social care. Used well, it can shift care from reactive to proactive and make truly preventative care possible.
But this is a shift that will only work if the technology is easy to use from day one. We believe that there should be no friction to be able to achieve what’s possible with any care management platform. Care workers already have enough on their plates without having to learn another system. A person using an AI solution on day one should be just as capable as the person using it on day 250.
Ultimately, AI based capabilities should help teams do more of what matters most to improve someone's health and wellbeing. It should never be about helping them finish tasks faster- we all know that time isn’t really ever saved in social care; it’s just repurposed. Seeing patterns and uncovering blind spots leveraging AI should feel easy, and teams should feel confident making decisions with connected data that backs it. And trust is so important here. None of this works if care teams don't trust the signals that technology-based intelligence is providing first.
Before we started work on our AI powered solutions, we created a set of principles that would guide us in our development. These principles are the blueprint for our commitment to developing responsible, safe AI that providers can trust.
We practise what we preach. AI has fundamentally transformed how we build Log my Care, and it's how a team our size can out-deliver companies many times larger. But a human always stays in charge of what we build, just as a human always stays in charge in your care setting.
We hold ourselves to four safety pillars in everything we build: clinically safe, compliance safe, data safe, operationally safe.
We back that up with public accountability, not just our own word for it. We're a signatory to the Digital Care Hub's responsible AI pledge, and we're active in the AI in Social Care Alliance.
Outputs are more consistent and more specific to your setting than a generic prompt could ever produce, and it's what lets your teams trace exactly why something's been flagged if a regulator asks.
Imagine a future where the huge amount of information your team already captures can be turned into meaningful actions that change the course of a life for the better. Where a change in sleep, fluid intake or behaviour gets spotted before it becomes a crisis, not after. This is true preventative and proactive care and is a major step-change in what’s possible for care teams – and the people they support.
Your teams already do the work to catch what matters – taking the time to run dedicated quality checks. We're not here to replace that. We're here to remove the manual weight of catching it and analysing it and then helping you to spot the patterns that matter. We’re committed to helping you do this with full trust in the AI tools available, so you can feel confident in knowing you can do roll this out safely and at scale.
If you're a provider, ask your tech partners the hard questions. Where does your data live? Is it used to train models? Can outputs be explained and audited? Does a human stay in control?
If you're part of this industry, join us in signing the Digital Care Hub's pledge on the responsible use of AI in social care, a pledge by tech providers to the social care community that's open to any supplier willing to commit to it.
We believe technology can help build a world where preventative care is possible for everyone who needs it, but only if we build it the right way, together. That's the manifesto we're committing to. Join us.