Kyndi and Medway Council: case study
Case study by Kyndi #SocialCareTransformation
The challenge
Medway Council's adult social care service faces significant demand pressures, with requests for care rising month on month and the complexity of need also increasing. The number of residents with dementia in Medway is estimated to rise by 38% by 2040. Against that backdrop, the council also needed to deliver millions of pounds of savings and cost avoidance within its adult social care budget. The challenge was how to maintain high-quality care while managing costs and resource pressures, and how to evidence where high-cost packages such as residential care referrals were unnecessary or overly restrictive. The aim was not to replace human care with technology, but to use technology to support the right level of care.
What we did
Working with Kyndi, the council-owned assistive technology company, the adult social care team implemented Lilli, smart home monitoring technology that uses discreet sensors and AI to understand how well someone is managing at home. By monitoring everyday behaviours including eating, drinking, mobility, sleep, hygiene and time outside, the insights support informed decisions about how independent someone is and the level of care they need, and flag when circumstances change so that interventions can be proactive rather than reactive.
Lilli was initially rolled out on the front door pathway to support initial care assessments and build an evidence base before being extended into learning disabilities and reablement, where cases are more complex. The main driver of scale has been a weekly best practice panel. Teams use it to discuss cases, focusing on packages above £400 per week, and review where the technology could support service users, for example, generating evidence for a move to residential care or for a reduction or increase in care visits. Teams now return to the panel regularly with positive results, embedding the service and shifting the culture.
The outcome
In the first year, Medway recorded over £1.5M in savings and cost avoidance, with tens of thousands of pounds in savings demonstrable within weeks of adoption. Care packages have been right-sized, and reliance on residential care has been reduced.
The qualitative outcomes are at least as significant. In some cases, the technology has evidenced that a waking-nights service was not needed, enabling better sleep for the person concerned. In others, it has supported older people to live in their own homes, with their pets and in their communities, for an extra six months, keeping community connection intact. Lilli has helped carers identify health decline early, for example flagging increased bathroom activity that indicated a UTI before it became a crisis admission. It has also given families reassurance and reduced their mental load, and given practitioners data to back up difficult conversations with the people they support.
As Jackie Brown, Assistant Director of Adult Social Services at Medway, put it: "Lilli is assisting us in transforming how care is delivered in Medway. It is driving a culture shift across the service, through which we are now led by data and insights to support us in making care package decisions."
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