Reducing costs and empowering citizens with help from IBM Watson Health
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- Europe
Country
- United Kingdom
Product
- IBM Watson Care Manager
- Harrow Council’s MCeP personal budget system
- IBM Design Thinking
Tech Stack
- Natural Language Processing
- Data Integration
- Data Visualization
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
Applicable Industries
- Cities & Municipalities
- Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Procurement
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Remote Asset Management
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
Harrow Council in northwest London serves around 250,000 people, in one of London’s most religiously and ethnically diverse boroughs. It is also home to an increasingly large population over the age of 85, a group that is expected to double in size in the next 20 years. Over the last few years, Harrow Council has developed a reputation for innovation. One project the council has been praised for is its groundbreaking My Community ePurse (MCeP) solution. Launched in 2013 in response to increasingly tight budgets, MCeP empowers service users by offering them control and choice over how they spend their social care personal budgets. MCeP has generated healthy competition among service providers and already gives people access to more than 750 providers across a wide range of services.
The Challenge
Harrow Council in northwest London, serving around 250,000 people, was tasked with reducing its social services budget by millions of pounds over four years. The council had already developed a reputation for innovation with its groundbreaking My Community ePurse (MCeP) solution, which empowers service users by offering them control and choice over how they spend their social care personal budgets. However, the council wanted to expand this solution and make it available to a larger audience by adding a healthcare component. The council believed that this expansion could result in further savings and provide eligible citizens with the ability to manage and control their own health and care budgets, choosing care services that would better match their needs.
The Solution
Harrow Council decided to use the IBM Watson Care Manager platform to add a healthcare component to its MCeP solution. The IBM Watson Care Manager solution is designed to give care managers and caseworkers a broad understanding of the people they serve so that they can create and tailor support plans to each person’s needs. The platform pulls data from various aspects of a person’s assessments and care plans, using its natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to search and analyse unstructured text for key concepts. This helps social care and health service workers quickly access information relevant to each individual. The in-depth information and an understanding of each individual may then help guide care workers in suggesting services or providers based on an individual’s needs while staying mindful of things that might be important to that person.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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