Cera Care (company)

Cera Care is a London-based technology-enabled home care company. Established to allow families to arrange, schedule and manage home care for elderly relatives, it uses an on-demand digital platform to match people seeking in-home assistance with professional carers.

History

Cera Care began as The Golden Era Club in 2015. In 2016 it was formally launched as Cera Care by Mahiben Maruthappu, a physician, researcher, and health policy specialist, and Marek Sacha, an engineer and entrepreneur. Regulated by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), it achieved a rating of Requires Improvement in October 2018, following an inspection undertaken in May 2018. The company raised seed money from investors including David Buttress, the former CEO of JustEat, and Peter SandS, the former CEO of Standard Chartered. With £1.3 million raised, at the time it was the largest seed-round funding in European healthcare history. Cera Care raised an additional £1.9 million in funding in April 2017.

In March 2017, the largest of the NHS Trusts, the Barts Health NHS Trust, partnered with Cera Care to provide carers for elderly patients in their own homes. The Trust sought to prevent bed blocking by accelerating the patient's discharge from the five Barts Health hospitals. The partnership also allowed NHS doctors to refer patients to carers through the Cera platform, potentially matching up to 6 million patients with caretakers. As the agreement with the NHS was finalised, Cera contracted Uber to transport both patients and carers.Following the launch of its partnership with Uber, Cera Care commenced a partnership with taxi service Gett to deliver items from London chemists to patients at home.

Cera Care introduced a chatbot, Martha, in May 2017. Created with Bloomsbury AI, it was designed to use artificial intelligence to review patients' digital records and provide health alerts based on data points gathered by care workers. Cera Care later developed a patient care dashboard to provide patients with on-demand access to care, medications, transportation, food, and doctor's services via tablet computer. It also claims to have developed a platform that predicts patient deteriorations by computing the risk of events such as hospitalisations based on care worker input.

As of 2017, Cera Care claimed to have 20 partnerships with NHS organisations, councils, and public organisations, including Age UK and the Dementia Action Alliance. It won the Health Startup of the Year award at the British Startup Awards, Dementia Care Provider of the Year at the LaingBuisson Awards, and the Digital Health Innovation of the Year award at the Global Awards. Cera Care was also included at the European Innovation Summit as one of the EU's Top 50 Startups.

According to the Health Service Journal the firm failed to register with the Information Commissioner's Office until February 2018, so it operated in breach of the Data Protection Act for more than a year. It claimed untruthfully to be delivering NHS funded care for several clinical commissioning groups and fake reviews of its services were placed on Trustpilot and Facebook.