We recently sat down for a chat with Sam Hussain, CEO and co-founder of Log my Care, provider of a digital care management platform designed to support efficiency and ease for social care staff.
Log my Care: the beginning, and the solution in practice
Sam shared that his passion for health tech led him to work for a health tech company providing a number of products, including a solution for nursing homes in the far east. Becoming the company’s UK country manager, Sam started to help them bring their software over to the UK which led to him developing an in-depth understanding of the “massive need” of care providers for a digital care record.
“There was and is a need to move away from pen and paper, but there’s also a need for really good tech – tech that doesn’t require vast amounts of training and implementation,” Sam reflected. As such, he decided to build, from the ground up, a “modern, intuitive platform that would help the care sector adopt technology.”
This led to the development of an electronic health record built specifically for social care. “We support care homes, supported living providers and home care agencies, providing them with a platform to record care about the people they support and all of the associated documentation – care plans, risk assessments, medications, consent management, incident reporting,” Sam explained. “It’s a long list; they have to record a lot in social care.”
Sam noted how his own technical knowledge from his background as an Oxford University engineering science graduate came into play. “I wanted to help social care make use of the vitally important care data that it holds, because social care collects such rich data on the people that it looks after. With pen and paper or with legacy systems, social care isn’t making the best use of that data. I wanted to elevate that data and put it in people’s hands in a really easy-to-use way that could help them make better decisions around care.”
For frontline carers, Log my Care’s solution provides a “modern, intuitive mobile app at their fingertips,” Sam said, “either when they are on a shift or when they are at someone’s home performing a care visit. It gives them access to that data – the latest information about that person, available in real-time, with updates being written at head office and instantly pushed through to the frontline workers.”
The carers, in turn, can send information back from the mobile app to head office. This involves “tens of millions of care recordings per day,” Sam stated. “Those flow back into our portal, so managers have got real-time visibility and dashboards showing them the state of care of the people they are looking after.” This includes highlighting trends and any missed actions, which Sam said “allows staff to be a lot more responsive than they could be with paper or old school solutions.”
The story so far
“We’ve emerged as a market leader within learning disabilities care,” Sam shared. “We’ve brought on several customers such as Livability, Look Ahead and Epilepsy Society; they are major names in the industry, so we are very proud to work with them. I think we have achieved this market leadership position by having really focused on this customer group for several years, building features that they have really needed.”
Log my Care has also become an NHS-assured supplier in the past three years. “The NHS are increasing their standards every year,” Sam pointed out, “so we have been progressing to ensure we can keep meeting those standards as they are updated. We’re very pleased that we have managed to get but also maintain those standards.”
In April, it was announced that Log my Care had secured a further £3 million in funding from existing investor Mercia Ventures, bringing the total funding to £7.25 million over the company’s lifetime. HTN covered the news here.
“We raised our first institutional investment in June 2022, and we’ve been growing well since that time. Our team has developed, our customer base has developed, and so have our revenues. The raise was a fairly straightforward process for us because we have very supportive investors who want to keep backing us, so we were able to have a very open dialogue with them about what we could do with further funds.”
Sam noted that the team feels “very lucky to have supportive capital backing”, especially at a time when many tech businesses are finding fundraising challenging. “We are in a fortunate position, but I think it speaks for the fact that not only we have been executing well and growing well, we have also built an awesome product. A lot of the growth is still to come.”
Looking to the future
The latest funding was raised for two main purposes, Sam shared; one of them is to help Log my Care become “hands down the market leader for learning disabilities care”.
This involves a number of initiatives that the team have built or are looking to build this year, such as positive behavioural support plans, an advanced incident management, and a feature for leading outcomes and goals.
Other plans include progressing in the home care side of the market. “We already have a large number of home care customers, and they have been very vocal about wanting a scheduling system for helping to get staff to the right place at the right time. So we are developing a rostering tool to support care managers in handling complex staff schedules. That will be a massive tech build for us this year.”
In five years’ time, Sam said that he would like to see Log my Care become “the world’s best care management system. Myself and my co-founder Adam are both very product-focused as founders; we’re both engineering science graduates from Oxford, and we both really care about building great, intuitive products. That’s our focus in the first instance.”
Once the platform is the best it can be, “we want to make sure that we are serving vulnerable people across the world,” Sam continued. “We don’t want to just be a UK-based platform, we want to expand internationally too.”
He concluded: “We want to use all the data that we are gathering to move to a world of preventative care. We want to be able to get ahead of incidents or negative health consequences before they happen, whether that means hospitalisations or seizures or falls or incidents of challenging behaviour. We believe that when you pair our data with other sensors and wearables, organisations will be able to complete a data picture of an individual and that will help them to reduce a lot of these unwanted outcomes, ultimately improving and extending lives.”
Many thanks to Sam for joining us.
