Last week I spent the day at the Digital Care Summit, hosted by Digital Care Hub, and there were lots of key takeaways and food for thought. What I liked about the day was that it wasn’t simply a room full of people talking about technology and telling us how brilliant digital tools are, but actually about how and what digital means for people, for staff and for the way we deliver care.

The day started with Greenwich Carers Centre, who enacted a role play to show what trying to access a service digitally can actually feel like. A GP appointment that now needs to be booked through an app rather than picking up the phone. An old phone that doesn’t have the capability, a robot asking you to prove you’re not a robot, systems timing out and having to start again.

There were plenty of laughs at different points of the performance, but actually, we’ve all experienced that frustration, and it made the majority of us reflect on the way we talk about digital exclusion.

We often talk about how older people are not able to use technology, but we need to stop this labelling.

Technology is for everyone now, and if we keep designing systems that assume everyone has the latest phone, understands how every app works and has the time and confidence to navigate endless verification processes, then perhaps the problem isn’t always the person. Perhaps it’s the system. And, as someone in the room pointed out, at what point does innovation become exclusion?

That was one of the questions I kept coming back to throughout the day. We can sometimes be guilty of becoming comfortable with the systems we’ve created. We build something, people get used to it, and then we build another layer on top. Another app, another login, another system, another process and, because it is digital, we call it progress. But when we step back and look, is it?

The sector has shown that we can adopt digital. We’ve come a long way from paper-based services and paper rotas, but the question now is what we actually do with all of this. How do we make data work for us rather than simply collecting more of it? How can digital help us deliver better outcomes for people and communities, and how do we make sure there is still a human being somewhere in the process?

The conversations around data and consent were interesting too. I think most of us would say that consent matters, but how much do we actually understand about what we are consenting to? I’ve agreed to share data through different apps and services over the years, but do I really know where that information goes, who can access it and how it might be used further down the line?

Probably not, and I suspect I’m not alone. With this in mind, we need to think about trust alongside technology.

There was also plenty of discussion around regulation, including the Digital Care Regulations and CQC’s updated position around AI. One thing I took from the CQC discussion was that they aren’t necessarily interested in telling providers which technology they should or shouldn’t use. The focus is much more around whether it is being used safely, whether providers have done the right checks and whether they understand what they are introducing.

That feels like the right conversation to be having. We shouldn’t be afraid of innovation, but neither should we assume that something is safe simply because it is new, digital or powered by AI.

A panel with Jane Townsend brought another issue into focus for me. We have spent years working around time and task. Paper rotas became digital rotas, paper processes became digital processes and spreadsheets became software, but have we actually changed the way we think about care, or have we just made the same processes quicker?

Jane talked about software ecosystems, bolt-ons and the number of different tools providers can end up using. Again, I think this comes back to the person.

We can measure an awful lot now with the data we have, but are we measuring the things that actually matter?

There were some really powerful examples of technology being used differently too.

• Amy Lewis talked about starting with the person and making sure that accessible training remains part of their journey.
• We heard about sensors being used to support someone’s independence, while still giving staff the information they need to step in when support is required.
• We saw telehealth tools in action from the team at City Care and the potential for information from people’s homes to be used alongside GP services.

That, to me, is where digital can be really powerful. Not replacing people or taking the human element out of care, but helping someone to live more independently while giving staff better information about when they actually need to be there.

Juliette also made the point that adoption isn’t a one-off, and I think that’s something we often underestimate.

We implement something, train people on it and move on to the next thing, but, like Juliette highlighted, real adoption takes time. People need to learn, teams find new problems, systems update and change, and we learn from what happens in practice. She brought the room back to remembering that digital adoption has to be an ongoing process.

And then there is the bigger issue of neighbourhood health. For me, this is where we continue the conversation. The panel highlighted how different NHS trusts can have different apps and systems and varying funding pots, but people don’t live their lives according to NHS organisational boundaries.

I couldn’t help but be shocked by the CQC who said that they won’t set the foundation for what neighbourhoods look and feel like, and I think this is a missed opportunity to ensure a consistent approach and prevent a postcode lottery from happening, like we already see within social care.

In summary, we have lots of technology which gives us lots of data, and we have lots of different organisations trying to solve problems. But what we need to do is spend more time asking what we actually want the experience to look like for the person using the service.

The Digital Care Summit was a good reminder of how far we’ve come and how the next step isn’t simply about becoming more digital, but about becoming better at using what we already have.

Some of the key actions for us all are:

• How do we make technology accessible?
• Review whether a digital process is actually easier, rather than assuming it is.
• How do we use data to improve outcomes rather than simply gathering it?
• How do we keep people at the centre of all of this?

Technology isn’t the point of all this. The person is.