Birdie CEO: Providing Home Care Tech Products for The Elderly

At Birdie, we believe that our elders deserve to age with confidence in the comfort of their own home. We use digital products, home connected devices and machine learning to help the care community deliver better quality, personalised, preventative care.

So that our loved ones can live at home longer, healthier and happier, out of care homes and hospitals.

1. First, we support care professionals with a suite of digital products to record care notes, timesheets and medication electronically and we gradually provide guidance on their work. With Birdie, not only do they save a tremendous amount of time, but they’re also more compliant & they deliver better, safer, care because what was on paper yesterday is now tracked in real time and proactively. We have created access for third-parties like local authorities or nurses to access the records if they are authorised and when they need to.

2. Second, we believe older adults must feel safe at home. We make sure that they can have peace-of-mind 24/7 thanks to our suite of home connected devices, such as motion sensors or fall detectors. If there is any emergency, our telecare centre will take action immediately be it for a fall, an older adult leaving her house at night or not being in the bedroom.

3. Third, we collect a vast amount of data from visitors and sensors to build the highest resolution picture of older adults’ health and wellbeing. With advanced machine learning, we detect health issues before they worsen and address appropriately – be it a Urinary Tract Infection or decline in mobility. This leads to significant lower hospital admission rates among the older adults served by Birdie. This means better health for the patients, but also significant savings for the NHS and the social care services overall.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
The idea behind Birdie has been with me for nearly twenty years. I saw first-hand the difficulty and sadness that came with making choices about the care needs of an older and much-loved family member. My grandfather was once a happy, playful, strong man. However, he lived with Parkinson’s disease and when my grandmother passed away, his health became poorer.

My family was faced with the big question: how do we balance independence with the right kind safety and care? It became clear that living in his own home was no longer possible and so he moved to a care home that was equipped to support residents with complex medical needs. However safe his new environment was, he was not happy there and I found seeing him like this to be increasingly distressing.

I launched Birdie in 2017 to help keep these vulnerable people in the safety and comfort of their own homes. I knew there was a better way to deliver care at later stages of life. By using technology to help improve the efficiency and quality of care that home care givers can provide, and also providing support for the huge number of informal caregivers such as family members. Technology is the next revolution and I knew it could have a massive impact on the care industry by providing personalised, preventative care.
 

How has the company fared during the pandemic?

 
Birdie has fared well during the pandemic. In pure numbers, we have doubled the number of users (we now have 15,000 care recipients visited by carers using our solution every week) and our growth is steady.

In a more general context, Healthtech has boomed during COVID19, and we have seen that trend with our customers. Many of them have decided to accelerate their digitisation plans and use new technology to become more efficient, and gain in quality of care.

We have also deployed numerous resources to help caregivers during the pandemic. For example, we enabled carers to identify risks and symptoms of covid in their patients, and provided digital tools to help volunteers to support isolated older adults. We have also secured new partnerships such as the Techforce19 award with the NHS to work on pilot projects with sensor technologies with large home care groups. We’re also in active conversations with NHS trusts to accelerate discharges from hospitals, which has become a top priority for the government to help protect the vulnerable.
 

What can we hope to see from Birdie in the future?

 
Our goal is to become the operating technology for the entire health and care community supporting older and vulnerable adults at home. We are continuing to build solutions, and reaching out to partners that can help us integrate them into the NHS. For example, care providers, hardware manufacturers and local authorities. It is essential that we partner with everyone within the care ecosystem. This will give us the holistic view we need to provide even better integrated care.

We know that an integrated care platform can radically transform the way care is delivered, making it more tailored, coordinated and preventative. This will help us improve the outcomes of older adults, flipping the typical health curve on its head and keeping them independent and comfortable for longer.

Interview with Max Parmentier, CEO at Birdie