Helping support digital inclusion

Adrian Flowerday, Managing Director of Docobo Remote Monitoring talks about digital inclusion.

When I set up Docobo back in 2001, the main focus was to reduce hospital admissions and 999 conveyances by utilising technology and remote monitoring in order to support out-of-hospital care for Long Term Condition patients. Initially, our focus was on older people, and we gained a lot of experience about the needs and cognitive abilities of the folk typically suffering one or more long term condition.

As the company has grown and expanded, and technologies such as Apps and web become widely accepted, our solution offering has become broader in terms of who we can support with remote patient monitoring and how we can support our customers to ensure digital inclusion and reduce inequalities in healthcare provision.

Over the last few years, we have seen a plethora of companies springing up offering various levels of remote monitoring capability with downloadable Apps. But our experience working amongst patients with technical and cognitive difficulties has been at the heart of our product range. In 2010, we worked with AgeUK and undertook research with a group of older people to develop our Class IIa medical device, CAREPORTAL®. This user-led research was fundamental in helping us create something that would be easy for the older population to use. Our CAREPORTAL now enables people who might be less tech savvy to collect key measurements, such as ECGs, and record other vital sign and symptomatic measurements easily and quickly, which are then automatically sent to a clinical hub for remote monitoring. Our DocoboAPP, available in the App stores, has been designed to be simple to use and navigate, and has options for visually impaired and speech synthesis.

Digital inclusion and making technology accessible to all regardless of age and ability – has always been really important to us as a company and has guided our product development throughout the years. More recently, Docobo having been acquired by Graphnet and becoming part of the System C & Graphnet Care Alliance, this has continued to guide our thinking, development and pathways.

Digital inequality has become a hot topic in healthcare, not least with the pandemic and the huge challenges that this created for the whole of the NHS. During the pandemic, we were able to work closely with clients to expand the use of both CAREPORTAL and locked down smartphones, to deliver an increased number of devices to those most effected by the pandemic, in areas such as Liverpool. We were also able to continue with the great work our clients were doing, by advancing into regions across the home counties and the West Midlands.