Choosing a care management platform isn’t always as considered a decision as it should be. When the government offered funding to help care services switch to digital care records, the incentive on the table often shaped that choice as much as fit did. We spoke to hundreds of providers who’d made the switch, and for many, the platform they ended up with matched the funding criteria more than it matched their sector.
Four years on from that initial switch, learning disability providers are struggling with their systems. Not because they made the wrong choice, but because the platform they picked wasn’t designed for the care they provide.
As a tech founder, few things are more frustrating than seeing digital care records sitting alongside paper Positive Behaviour Support plans, spreadsheets tracking outcomes and separate systems for incidents. That's not what digital transformation should look like, and care providers deserve better. It's a similar story for the people receiving care, who are too often left out of their own records altogether.
Learning disability care and elderly care aren’t cut from the same cloth. In elderly care settings, we often expect to support residents through a loss of independence and take on more and more tasks for them. In learning disability care, independence is often the goal and progress is measured through outcomes, not completed tasks. Care planning and Positive Behaviour Support are dynamic, individual and led by the person receiving support.
It’s clear the way learning disability care is delivered is different, so why shouldn’t the way care is recorded be different too?
When you adapt a generic system, everybody loses. Learning disability providers are left with systems that don’t quite meet their needs, creating unnecessary workarounds, disconnected information and duplicated recording.
This disconnect means teams spend more time working around software than supporting people to achieve meaningful outcomes. Managers lack oversight, and manually gathering evidence for inspections adds to their workload.
These problems don’t occur because a care provider is doing something wrong; they’re a direct result of trying to make a generic care platform work for a specialist service.
Learning disability providers deserve purpose-built systems that work with them, not against them.
Positive Behaviour Support plans need to bring together communication preferences, strengths, personal goals, triggers, proactive strategies and incident management, giving teams a complete picture of the person they're supporting and the information they need to deliver consistent care.
Care plans should reflect the realities of learning disability services, capturing communication, interests, preferred routines, relationships and the support each person needs to live as independently as possible.
The best care plans put people at the centre of their own story. Supported people should have every route to take part in their own records: signing off their support plans, writing their own logs, having logs read back to them, or recording their own updates by voice or video, whatever suits them best.
Outcomes and goals should be person-led, meaningful and linked to everyday support, making it easy for teams to evidence progress over time and demonstrate improvements in quality of life.
Providers delivering residential care, supported living and community care also need connected records across services, giving managers clear oversight and ensuring teams have the information they need wherever support is delivered.
Log my Care was built alongside care providers and their teams. We didn’t start with assumptions; we spent time with providers in their services to make sure we understood how their teams work and what they really need.
By understanding where existing systems created friction, we could build the tools necessary to really support meaningful outcomes.
To this day, we work in partnership with the sector by listening to our customers' needs, iterating on their feedback and co-developing our platform for continuous improvement.
We chose to build for the learning disability sector because we saw the gap and felt inspired to build towards independence. Hardworking providers were trying to deliver specialist care using software designed for something else. They didn’t need more features, but software that reflected how they actually deliver care.
Rather than asking them to adapt an existing platform, we wanted to build the functionality they deserve.
When learning disability providers have access to software that’s built for them, information flows naturally. Positive Behaviour Support becomes part of everyday care, incidents lead to learning, goals are meaningfully progressed, and managers have a clearer picture of care. Inspections become easier too, with evidence created through day-to-day recording rather than gathered manually afterwards.
Learning disability providers shouldn't have to adapt their software to fit the way they deliver care. Technology should reflect the reality of specialist services, supporting the work teams already do and making it easier to evidence the quality of care they provide.
That's the foundation we built Log my Care on.