From Frankenplatform chaos to unified care: how East London Care and Support escaped the digital duct tape

Since 2009, East London Care and Support has been making a difference in the London Borough of Newham. They support over 100 people with everything from elderly care and dementia support to learning disabilities, autism, and mental health services.

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What makes them special? It's simple - they genuinely care about helping every person they support live their best life. Whether that's through their domiciliary care or specialist autism Rising Star day services, Director Tanya Lavis and her team focus on what really matters, building independence and helping people flourish at home.

We get it - sometimes you end up with what can only be called a "Frankenplatform." You know the type: different care technology systems that were never designed to work as one, bolted together into a crumbling patchwork of tools held together with manual workarounds, duplicate data entry, and digital duct tape.

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That's exactly what happened at East London Care and Support. They'd cobbled together paper systems, CM2000, Excel spreadsheets for rotas, and Word documents that needed constant updating and printing. Sound familiar?

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As Tanya explains: "We signed up to Birdie Care in December 2022 as we were on a programme to modernise our business. So we moved away from manual paper-based systems to Birdie Care as our first electronic care monitoring system."

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The team was drowning in the classic Frankenplatform problems:

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Scheduling chaos that costs money: "When I started, I was using the spreadsheet. So sending the spreadsheet to the carers for weekly rota. We were having so many issues with the spreadsheet. Rota errors caused two carers to turn up on the same shift," recalls Trushar Jeevan, now Operations Manager.

Tanya adds: "We were having a number of issues with duplicate calls being scheduled, which had a cost impact to our company and caused reputational damage as it was showing that we were not well organised."

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Admin eating up your day: Brandon Walsh, Operations Admin and Implementation Specialist, describes the struggle: "The biggest challenge when using multiple systems is updating one thing and then having to update the system itself. It costs time for the admin team… what used to take days to complete now really only takes a couple of hours with Birdie."

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Medication management headaches: Care Coordinator and Medication Supporter Lanka Weerakoon explains: "We used to receive paper MAR charts from our carers once a month, which I audited and updated into an Excel spreadsheet. I had to chase carers to bring paper MARs and deal with lost paperwork.”

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Flying blind on operations: "We had no way to see what was happening in real-time," adds Operations Manager Karanjit Kaur. "There was no communication between systems, and we couldn't get a complete picture of our operations.”

East London Care and Support chose Birdie because they needed everything to actually work together. No more digital duct tape holding things together.

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"I think the final straw was that things just used to take a very long time when using multiple systems. We'd have to update something here and then we'd have to go in and change something on another system that we used to have. But again, with Birdie, it's not a problem. Everything is there." Brandon explains.

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Say goodbye to double bookings: "So when we were introduced by Birdie in 2022… the rota [would not allow] two carers to be scheduled for a single call. So basically if you put one carer, it's not going to transfer to the other carers because it's already allocated, which is fantastic," says Trushar

The intelligent rostering system now provides complete visibility: "Early in the morning, the first thing I do is go to the roster and check from top to bottom. I can see there's no travel time issues and no overlapping shifts. It helps me out - in five minutes I can check everything, and then I can focus on my other work.”

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Transform medication management: Lanka's medication auditing process got revolutionised: "With Birdie, medication auditing is so much easier as I receive alerts when something hasn't been completed correctly, which I can then immediately rectify. We no longer have to chase carers to bring paper MARs, and I don't have to worry about lost paperwork - which is a huge time saver and improves our CQC compliance.”

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Get real-time visibility: "We now have real-time updates from carers," explains Karanjit. "We have complete visibility, reduced mistakes, and everything is more efficient and less stressful.”

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Make care planning actually work: Care Coordinator Anam explains: "Since using Birdie, we have many efficiencies as the system prompts us to do effective person centred care planning."

Carer and Trainee Manager Sadaf adds: "Because of Birdie, the tasks are clear, making service delivery more effective, and it is good to be able to record observations such as clients' moods and well-being. The logs are also a very useful feature as we can see and read logs from previous care calls. So we are aware of what has happened in other care calls with the client before we visit."

Get hours back in your day: "It's hard to put a number on how many hours we were losing, but Birdie has nullified that completely because it's one integrated system," says Brandon. "It cuts admin time, which is always good for a sector that moves as fast as care.”

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Support that actually helps: "The customer support has been fantastic," notes Trushar. "Whatever issues we have, Birdie comes back straight away and resolves them as soon as possible. They're continuously improving their system and service.”

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Care teams that are actually happy: "If I was talking to another provider that was struggling, I'd say Switching to a single platform is amazing. Your care staff will be happier. The amount of time spent on admin and logistics will be cut in half, which is something that you always want, which means care staff can focus on other things, really delivering good care without having to worry about multiple systems or a system that just doesn't work correctly." Brandon advises.

Tanya's recommendation is clear: "We would say to any provider struggling with manual or disjointed systems that we highly recommend Birdie Care as it has improved our processes, our care delivery and our compliance."

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The transformation at East London Care and Support shows that ditching your Frankenplatform isn't just about better technology, it's about giving your team the tools they need to focus on what they do best: caring for people.