Leading national home care services provider, Carewatch has partnered with Advanced as its strategic IT managed services provider to transition several disparate systems into a single connected infrastructure in the cloud. The contract, worth more than £5 million over 5 years, will deliver Advanced’s home care rostering solution Staffplan, within a highly scalable, secure and resilient hosted environment. This will ensure Carewatch is better able to serve its 10,000 service users who rely on the scheduled visits from its care workers.
Carewatch has worked with Advanced since 2011, having initially implemented its home care rostering solution with only 350 users and a single data centre. During this period, Carewatch has grown exponentially, now operating with 650 IT users amongst 4,500 employees. Following a rigorous IT procurement process, Carewatch identified its priorities as having a resilient and scalable platform in place to not only deliver care services today but with the scalability to grow in the future. The care provider also wanted to remove the complexity of managing multiple suppliers.
The new contract will extend the delivery of Staffplan within a robust and secure hosted environment, while providing a minimum service level agreement (SLA) of 99.6 percent. This covers multiple hosted services that are currently handled disparately:
- Fully hosted telephony system adhering to the support SLA
- Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
- Additional infrastructure requirements to provide a N+1 configuration
Carewatch is also implementing the payroll management solution, OpenPeople from Advanced, as well as its document management solution. This will help the care provider increase financial transparency, enhance communications and streamline legislative compliance processes.
“As the business has grown in size and reputation, we needed to ensure the vital services that Carewatch provide remain online, secure and available 24hrs, seven days a week. We also wanted to use technology to unlock the potential of our workforce. For example, care workers will operate through the Advanced Hosting platform when logging on remotely to manage their visit schedules, via smart devices such as a tablet or phone. This saves valuable time; care workers won’t have to spend time organising paperwork and instead can concentrate on what is really important, the care of its service users,” comments Scott Christie, CEO, Carewatch
Advanced was successful in winning the contract due to its unique ability to provide a care sector specific solution in Staffplan and ability to manage its business-critical services within a 24x7 hosted infrastructure, as well as backup and disaster recovery services in the event of an emergency.
“We feel incredibly proud that Carewatch has chosen not only to renew but extend our remit with them. We strive to make a difference to our customers with our software solutions and services. It’s important that we can positively impact the lives of their customers, in this instance, to care workers providing mission critical services to vulnerable people living at home."
Gordon Wilson, CEO, Advanced
“The care sector is operating under significant pressure and it is great to see organisations such as Carewatch recognise how technology can help support the best possible service to their customers as well as drive their own growth.”
Advanced will oversee the transition from several disparate systems spread across different providers to an integrated, connected infrastructure operating in the cloud. The extended project will go live early 2017.