Continuing Healthcare & Children’s Continuing Care

Continuing Healthcare: Our tool and algorithm for CHC has been in development since 2015 and has been refined using large samples of real cases from across many NHS areas, resulting in the most accurate budgetary estimates available in the sector. The Needs Profile tool underpinning the calculation captures all of the key resource-relevant information about an individual’s needs, available unpaid support and living situation in a consistent and straightforward manner. This is supplemented with the individual’s assessed DST levels to ensure the appropriate local cost levels for their specific health needs are reflected in the calculation. A new tool is also now available to generate PHB estimates specifically for people found eligible for CHC Fast Track funding.

Continuing Care: A separate tool and algorithm we’ve developed enables calculation of estimated budgets for children and young people eligible for Continuing Care or health and social care joint funding.

Formulate for PHBs enables an ICB to calculate an accurate estimation of the sum of money required to support each individual needing a PHB across the Continuing Healthcare and Continuing Care cohorts. Importantly, this includes notional budgets as well as direct payments, which has helped our customers to increase their PHB numbers towards their targets whilst monitoring and managing their overall spend – as they have an accurate and reliable tool to support these processes.

The long-term development and widespread use of our tools for resource allocation make them the most reliable and defensible solution available – enabling more confident decision-making and reducing the likelihood of challenges escalating to costly and time-consuming legal proceedings.

Using our ‘CareCalc’ digital platform means information is available to those who need it as soon as it is entered, eliminating delays caused by people being in different places or not being able to efficiently locate or access paper-based information or files on shared drives.

We understand that you may want to try out our tools to see how they might work for your service before making a longer-term commitment. There are two options:

(1) We can provide you with ‘informal’ access to a demonstration environment for a defined time period at no cost. This allows you to get a sense of the look and feel of the tools, but as the Formulate models would not be configured to reflect your local costs and commissioning arrangements, this doesn’t allow for real accuracy testing of estimated budgets.

(2) If you would like to conduct a more formal ‘pilot’ with a locally-configured model – for example with a defined group of 5-10 assessors over e.g. 3 months – a quote can be arranged for this, with a subsequent reduction on your first year’s licence fee should you proceed to a full roll-out.

2023 sees the introduction of some new features within our CareCalc digital platform – which will enable relevant managers to:

- See ‘at a glance’ summary information relating to Needs Profiles and calculations completed within the system, such as numbers of cases per month and average Estimated PHB figures.

- Pull-off full data extracts from the system which can then be ‘sliced and diced’ within Excel or imported into other software where required.