Cera Care

Cera Care is a London-based technology-enabled home care company.[1] Established to allow families to arrange, schedule and manage home care for elderly relatives, it uses an on-demand digital platform to match people seeking in-home assistance with professional carers, allowing them to keep updated on a patient's progress, while also using Artificial Intelligence to predict potential health deteriorations. It provides services for different type of elderly care.[2]

Cera Care
IndustryElderly care
Healthcare
Health technology
FoundedNovember 2015 in London, England
FoundersMahiben Maruthappu and Marek Sacha
Headquarters
London
,
England
ServicesHome care, Emergency care, On-demand transportation, Delivery services
Websiteceracare.co.uk

History

Cera Care was formally launched in 2016.[3] In November 2016, the company raised £1.3 million from investors including David Buttress, the former CEO of JustEat, and Peter Sands, the former CEO of Standard Chartered.[4] At the time it was the largest seed-round funding in European healthcare history.[5][6] In April 2017, Cera Care raised a further £1.4 million in financial backing.[7] To date, the company raised £20 million over the past three years.[8]

In March 2017, Cera Care partnered with the Barts Health NHS Trust to provide carers for elderly patients in their own homes and accelerating patients' discharge from the five Barts Health hospitals, in order to prevent bed blocking.[9] The partnership also allowed NHS doctors to refer patients to carers through the Cera platform, potentially matching up to 6 million patients with carers.[10][11][12]

As the agreement with the NHS was finalised, Cera contracted Uber to transport both patients and carers.[13][14][15]

Following the launch of its partnership with Uber, Cera Care commenced a partnership with taxi service Gett to deliver items from London chemists to patients at home.[16]

Cera Care introduced a chatbot, Martha, in May 2017. Created with Bloomsbury AI, Martha is a virtual assistant able to review patients' digital records and answer questions for both patients and carers, basing the answers on data points gathered by care workers and digitized care records.[17][18][19] Cera Care later developed a patient care dashboard to provide patients with on-demand access to care, medications, transportation, food, and doctor's services via tablet computer. It also claims to have developed a platform that predicts patient deteriorations by computing the risk of events such as hospitalisations based on carer input.[20][21]

In 2018, Cera Care expanded to Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, in addition to acquiring care businesses in Huddersfield and Nottingham.[22][23] As part of their growth plans, they invested £10 million to expand to 14 cities across the UK and roll out new technologies, as well as launch a major recruitment drive for the social care sector through social media.[24][25]

At the beginning of 2019, Cera Care partnered with IBM to test sensors used in self-driving cars to help with monitoring of elderly people. The aim of this new product was to use the data collected by sensors and alert caregivers of any change in patterns that could signify a deterioration in patients’ health, allowing them to respond faster and consequentially reduce avoidable hospital stays.[26][27][28][29] Also in 2019, Cera care launched its Smart Care app, which uses machine learning and data from 68,000 care records, reviewed by professionals, to predict and alert carers to possible health deteriorations with 82% accuracy.[30]

It acquired the domiciliary care division of Mears Group in February 2020.[31]

Corporate affairs

Management structure

The founders of Cera Care are Mahiben Maruthappu, doctor, and health policy specialist, and engineers and entrepreneurs Marek Sacha, and Martin Ocenas.[32][33][2]

Former Deputy Prime Minister Sir Nick Clegg was Chairman of Cera Care’s Advisory Board in 2018, a position later taken on by Sir David Behan, former CEO of the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Among the members of the Advisory Board are Dame Carol Black, former President of the Royal College of Physicians and Thomas Zeltner, former Vice-Chair of the World Health Organisation.[34][35]

Operations

Cera Care provides different kinds of elderly care: palliative care, live-in care, post-discharge care, respite care and dementia care.

Regulated by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the company achieved a rating of Good in December 2019, following an inspection undertaken in October 2019.[36] The company started its operations in London and has since expanded to the rest of England.[37]

Controversies

According to the Health Service Journal, the firm failed to register with the Information Commissioner's Office until February 2018, and was allegedly operating without the proper regulation. In May 2018, the company was accused of misrepresenting some partnerships with the National Health Service and clinical commissioning groups and placing and placing fake reviews of its services were placed on Trustpilot and Facebook. Following the allegations, CeraCare removed mentions of the partnerships that were not up to date from its website and investigated reviews on Facebook and Trustpilot.[38][39]

Performance

As of 2017, Cera Care claimed to have 20 partnerships with NHS organisations, councils, and public organisations, including Dementia Action Alliance.[40] It won the Health Startup of the Year award at the British Startup Awards; the Award for Dementia Care and Rising Star at the LaingBuisson Awards; and the Digital Health Innovation of the Year award at the Global Awards. Cera Care was also included at the European Innovation Summit as one of the EU's Top 50 Startups.[41][42][43][44]

In October of 2018 the UK Government and Secretary of State for Health launched their Vision for the Future of Healthcare in the country. Cera Care was used as a case study for what the future of British care could look like.[45]

In 2019, it was named the Most Outstanding Home Care Provider and awarded prizes for Live-In-Care Expertise, and Best Technology, at the Home Care Awards.[46] It also received the award for Best Use of Artificial Intelligence by Health Tech Digital and ranked 37 in the Escape 100 list of the Best Companies to work for in 2019.[47][48] It was also named top AgeTech startup in the UK in Beauhurst's analysis of the sector.[49]

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