Shared Alarm Receiving Centre (ARC)
COSLA’s Digital Office and Scotland Excel completed the procurement of a Telecare Shared Alarm Receiving Centre in October 2023. The Shared ARC is cloud based allowing for greater systems interoperability with social work and social care providers and NHS systems. This expedites the transition from analogue to digital and provides the opportunity to improve innovation and resilience across services. Overall, the introduction of the Shared ARC allows, for increased data sharing between service providers, Local Authorities and Health Boards. The Shared ARC now hosts its first Health and Social Care Partnership, with a further eleven planned in the coming months. Additionally, in July 2023 the Telecare Information Framework (TIF) was launched. This will support services to maximise efficiency, improve data accuracy and generate the insight required for ongoing improvement and innovation. This data set will provide a consistent and standardised view of the social care provided across all 32 Local Authority areas. The TIF supports the shift to early intervention and prevention by providing the necessary details for professionals to plan and develop services effectively.
Case Study - Shared ARC
Telecare Services are at the interface between health and social care. They contribute support that is person-centred, using various types of sensors in the home to alert and enable intelligent rapid responses where adverse events have occurred, or to allow prompt notification of a sudden risk to the person’s health and well-being.
The Shared ARC is a cloud-based technology solution that assists Telecare Service Providers as they progress with their transition from analogue to digital Telecare. It provides a unique platform for innovation which can support the wider Health and Social Care sectors ambitions around better use of data, and early intervention and prevention. The platform provides many benefits such as:
- providing a unified approach to data enabling joined up working across the sector,
- improved access to and use of data,
- greater interoperability with other datasets and systems across health and social care,
- reduced technical burden of adopting digital telecare for services,
- provides a resilient and flexible approach to telecare service delivery,
- delivers a platform to foster innovation and power pro-active services,
- the ability to leverage data from wearable devices, and other digital devices.
This work has been an important step in improving the data landscape in social care. The national programme is working with a group of 17 adopter organisations to onboard them to the new platform.