Autumna, the UK’s largest and most comprehensive elder care directory, has announced the launch of OpenScore – the UK’s first real-time care home scoring system – in order to transform the way care seekers assess care, and how care providers market their services.
OpenScore provides a live score out of 10, with care providers being able to quickly communicate performance using multiple data points that are aggregated in real time. These data points include:
- Live regulatory ratings and audits: CQC, CIW, CIS, RQIA
- Live daily visitors' reviews of listed homes
- Live ESG updates such as eco-friendly products, recycling systems, solar and wind power, carbon neutral status
- Live food hygiene ratings
- Dining, food offering: type of food offered, flexibility of dining etc
- Transparency of cost
This is the first time the UK has introduced a live scoring system for social care, with previous assessments relying mainly on CQC ratings, which can be years out of date.
Autumna has teamed up with some of the UK’s leading care associations, financial institutions, academia, care providers, and government regulators to launch OpenScore. These include Care England, LaingBuisson, Care UK, Legal & General, Let’s Go Create, University of Kent, Virgin Money, Stephens Scown Solicitors, Person Centred Software, and CASPA.
With 70-80 per cent of care homes currently ranked as ‘Good’ by the CQC, many care homes lack the ability to publicly promote their unique selling points to the public. OpenScore allows care homes to differentiate between each other and the ‘inadequate’ and ‘requires improvement’ care homes will not have to wait for a CQC inspection – which can take years – to showcase improvement.
Debbie Harris, founder and managing director at Autumna, said: “Not only is this intended to improve standards by giving more control to the care provider to improve their services proactively, but the tool will also address one of the biggest challenges facing the social care sector: trust and transparency for the public.
“When a care seeker needs to find appropriate care quickly, OpenScore provides an instant, accurate, live and relevant overview of the quality of care on offer.”
