CQC drives high-quality health and social care in the most testing times with Dynamics 365

Protecting the well-being of 55 million people

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) plays a vital role in protecting the health and well-being of English citizens. Its job is to help ensure that more than 50,000 care providers in the country—from hospitals to care homes—are delivering appropriate standards of care.

“We serve the entire population,” says Stuart Dunn, Interim Head of Hospital Inspection for Mental Health and Community Health Services in the Midlands and East at Care Quality Commission. “At some point, every single person will need these services, so we want to make sure that people receive safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality, and well-led care—in a timely fashion.”

But ensuring high-quality health and social care for the country’s more than 55 million people is no easy task. Every provider type requires a different form of regulation, and legacy IT systems that dated back almost a decade made this very time consuming. CQC understood that it needed to transform from using a retrospective method to an information-led quality assurance model, so it set out to deliver a modern care assurance platform with Microsoft Dynamics 365.

A data-driven model

CQC’s primary driver was to move away from its frequency-based inspection model, in which it visited care providers on a predetermined schedule, toward a new data-driven regulatory platform that could provide timely insights into where CQC’s resources were best directed. The first step was for CQC to replace its paper-based processes, which relied on inspectors filling out forms during site visits and manually entering information back at the office.

Further details delivered by email, phone, and even by fax often augmented this information, which created disjointed data streams and made it difficult for inspectors to gain a complete picture of providers. “We wanted to help our people capture data in a much more structured and detailed way so we can really see the state of things in real time,” says Mark Sutton, Chief Digital Officer at Care Quality Commission.

CQC set about building a new regulatory platform using Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise to help gather data from numerous locations, including new data streams like social media sources, providing inspectors with a high-level view of every health care provider. It also used Microsoft Power Apps to build a front-end application for inspectors, who use it during site visits to complete reports quickly and easily onsite without using paper forms. With the combination of Dynamics 365 and Power Apps, CQC started working to modernize its entire process, from the planning and preparation stage through to inspections and the publishing of ratings and reports.

Crisis—and a catalyst for change

Then, COVID-19 began to spread across the globe. CQC needed to act quickly to help the National Health Service (NHS) and other health and social care providers tackle the crisis, reduce the stress on health care providers, and help keep patients safe when seeking care and treatment. “We needed something up and running—and we needed it fast,” says Sutton. “So, we turned to Microsoft for help.”

CQC reached out to the Microsoft Catalyst team for help, using a Catalyst workshop to quickly build its Emergency Support Framework (ESF) to address the looming health crisis. Within just a week of the workshop, the Catalyst team had produced a working prototype of the ESF to understand the pressures that the United Kingdom’s health and social care providers, including the NHS, were facing in their responses to COVID-19. With help from KPMG, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, CQC then implemented this prototype as a live service. It used Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to survey more than 10,000 home care providers, and it processed the data with Dynamics 365 to better understand COVID-19 home care challenges. CQC then provided the results to all the relevant agencies to help coordinate their responses and ensure every care provider was getting the support it needed.

“With Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, we quickly delivered an emergency response that was highly secure, robust, scalable, and accessible,” says Sutton. “And that was incredibly important in the context of a global emergency.”

CQC also used Dynamics 365 to create an appointment booking system that gave approximately 1.6 million social care staff the opportunity to access drive-through testing for COVID-19—often by the next day. This meant that thousands of care workers could continue working while reducing risk for their service users. The project earned a letter of thanks from the Secretary of State for Health.

Better decisions, more innovation, improved health care

Creating the Emergency Support Framework helped CQC accelerate its digital transformation and laid the perfect foundation for its new regulatory platform. With Customer Service Enterprise, CQC can provide its inspectors with the data they need to understand which sites and providers need their support the most. 

This will make inspections much easier and far more efficient than they were with the original paper-based processes. And with CQC’s new mobile application, reports that previously took 10 days to process internally and weeks to publish can now be submitted immediately and shared with providers and the public more quickly. The time saved will be redirected to help care providers improve their services—resulting in a better overall standard of care across the country.

“With Dynamics 365, we’ve built a much more mobile way of working,” says Dunn. “We can immediately upload key information to enable rapid decision making to support providers and the public.”

And this is just the beginning. CQC is already anticipating the future of this platform. “Going forward, we plan to use machine learning and AI in Dynamics 365 to automatically provide insights about where to focus our attention and to share meaningful analytics with providers and the public,” says Sutton. “As we continue to innovate and modernize with Dynamics 365, we can help improve overall health and social care for the entire English public.”

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