Quickheart
Support Planning (beta released)
Planning has two Assessments: Carers and OT (small equipment), an extremely comprehensive set of clinical & environment assessment created by Stockport's OTs for prescription items. The module also includes tools for Worker to validate/adjust IB and to help Service User to decide how to arrange/manage their Support.
Marketplace (beta released)
Considerable consultation with users & providers created their ideal ASC "Shopping Mall"
Information & Advice
We started working with Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council on a DoH CSED initiative to reduce the cost of inappropriate calls to Adult Social Care. This project created "mycaremychoice.org.uk, an Information & Advice website covering all aspects of ASC in a highly visual and intuitive design, which delivered c£330,000 saving pa (before & after Benefits Case Study for DH).
RAS Needs Assessment
A core part of the CSED project was Quickheart's in depth "ethnographic" research to understand the needs and motivations of Service Users and their advisers, which provided a wealth of insights into how best to provide information to this target audience. One of the most revealing insights highlighted that being offered care by the Council was seen as a negative. In users eyes Care meant being dependent on, whereas their prime objective was to maintain their independence as long as possible.
These insights led Stockport to engage us in designing a Customer Portal for Personalisation, to both stimulate Service User self-direction and to simplify the Councils assessment processes. The system we built is a universal assessment with integrated modules for assessing levels of need in Mental Heath, Learning Disabilities and Physical disabilities as well as Safeguarding and Dementia.
It includes FACs eligibility and LA funding eligibility criteria along with a user contribution Financial Assessment, which enables very consistent and accurate RAS budgeting. This module has now been interfaced in Enfield with CareFirst and adapted for a Children's Assessment and Short Break RAS in Warwickshire.
RussiaWe were discovered by the President of Probusiness Bank when he was in Europe seeking best western practice to deploy in Russia.
Our first project was with their fledgling loans company, "Life", which handled sub prime lending in the proximity of shopping areas. The business had extraordinarily low default rates, even though Russia does not have the equivalent of Experian credit checking, and this was attributed to the in-depth interviews conducted by credit managers.
The problem we were asked to assist with related to the customer facing sales process, which worked superbly in some areas of Russia but struggled in others.
During our discovery process, ethnographic research identified the root cause as transactional analysis issues with such diverse regional cultural attitudes. It also revealed some fundamental "trust" problems with using a Western banking approach (branding and experience) in this sub prime market.
The end of our discovery phase was a one week workshop with the whole management team in Quickheart's offices in UK, during which we analysed and distilled the findings and developed a series of strategic hypotheses. These were tested in Russia and a new Brand Strategy formalised, the implementation of which required a new brand identity, store design, staff recruitment and training programme, interactive sales process, POS and advertising.
At this stage Quickheart was invited to take the role of prime contractor, accountable for engaging best in class suppliers and ensuring the strategic alignment of all work streams.
The dream team we engaged were Michael Wolff (Creative Director), Urban Salon (Store design),
NB Studios (Logo & Print), Robin Hamer (Training), with Quickheart creating the sales process.
The project took some 12 months to launch. The sales system and training have been rolled out across all of Russia and the stores designs are following.
