Our technology & AI
Smarter, preventative, personalised care
At Cera, we're harnessing the power of technology to transform care – helping people live longer, better lives in their own homes. Learn more about Cera's mission here.
Cera is one of the UK's largest home care providers. Our 10,000 carers and nurses deliver 2.5 million service user home visits each month, using our technology and AI tools to make care safer, more preventative and more efficient.
As the population ages and demand for health and social care grows, using technology to expand access to high-quality, preventative care isn't just an ambition – it's a necessity.
As a HealthTech, we know we can't rely on outdated systems to meet these challenges. That's why we don't just adopt technology – we build it ourselves. Our teams of product managers, data scientists and engineers work hand-in-hand with Cera's 10,000+ carers and nurses to design and deliver tools that make their work easier, enabling them to provide more personalised, preventative care, and drive real-world impact.
The Cera App
Home healthcare has historically relied on paper-based records, making it challenging to consistently track service users' health over time, predicting and preventing risks.
Our Cera App changes that. At each home visit they deliver, our carers and nurses collect patient symptoms and observations digitally via our Cera App. Logging indicators like sleep, mood and hydration, their inputs build a clear picture of each service user's needs, while standardising data collection across hundreds of locations.
By replacing paper-based notes with quick, real-time digital recording during visits, the Cera App reduces admin time for our carers and nurses. It also powers our preventative AI tools. We've developed smart AI algorithms that scan service users' data at scale: spotting anomalies and flagging up service users who are at risk of a fall or other health risk, such as an infection. Our system flags these high-risk cases with care teams – prompting them to take preventative action in the community – from adjusting care routines, to escalating cases to a GP or clinical team. This enables us to nip health issues in the bud – preventing health emergencies, A&E visits and hospital admissions, saving and improving lives, and easing NHS pressures.
Powering a world-leading
home healthcare dataset
Preventing avoidable health risks requires a complete view of each service user's health, yet this level of insight has often been out of reach in home care.
Cera's technology is powered by our world-leading home healthcare dataset of over 230 billion service user health data points, collected through a combination of digital health plans, integrated medication records, dynamic risk scoring and real-time care observations during home visits. Together, these create detailed, longitudinal health profiles, rich with insight into each service user's wellbeing.
This dataset underpins our predictive models, early warning systems and decision-support tools – flagging thousands of alerts each day. This helps carers and nurses prioritise the right interventions, delivering smarter, more preventative care.
Service user impact
Cera's technology transforms quality of life for service users by supporting them with personalised, preventative care in the comfort of their own homes — enabling them to stay connected to their families and communities.
Building and supporting
the care workforce
Our AI tools work alongside and empower our workforce. None of our impact would be possible without the thousands of carers and nurses using our tools to deliver preventative, personalised care on the ground. Their expertise and compassion, combined with technology, are helping service users live longer, healthier lives at home.
Health and social care face critical workforce shortages, with an estimated 1 million additional workers needed by 2040 to meet rising demand. In a sector known for high turnover, recruiting and training a skilled workforce is essential to ensure people receive the care they need.
Cera's technology is helping to meet this challenge by attracting new talent into care, equipping carers and nurses with expert training, and providing ongoing support at scale. This enables our frontline staff to deliver high-quality, personalised, preventative care to those who need it most.
Supporting Government and healthcare systems
Health and social care systems face rising demand as the population ages, combined with funding pressures and ongoing staff shortages.
Our technology helps these systems do more with less. Demand for Cera's AI-powered model has grown rapidly, with over a hundred UK Local Governments and two-thirds of NHS regions now using our services.
Third-party analyses show our model has saved the UK Government and NHS over £1 billion to date by reducing avoidable hospital admissions, freeing up beds and easing pressures on healthcare services – contributing £1.5 million in daily savings. By improving efficiency, boosting capacity and reducing referrals to residential care, our AI tools also help Local Governments free up resources to invest in better care for their communities.
Bridging research
and real-world care
Over-65s represent two-thirds of illness in the UK, yet they are often under-represented in healthcare research, limiting opportunities for better prevention and treatment.
At Cera, we're using our home healthcare dataset to change this. The billions of health data points our carers and nurses collect every month via our Cera App build a deep, longitudinal picture of the needs, health risks and conditions of older people in our care. By making these insights available to healthcare researchers, we are tackling long-standing health inequalities, while ensuring that advances in healthcare directly benefit older service users in their daily lives.
Our healthcare research programme aims to give tens of thousands of over-65s the chance to access innovative new treatment options for conditions such as dementia, cardiovascular disease, COPD and diabetes, while improving prevention for conditions like osteoporosis and osteoarthritis. This means better, earlier interventions and improved outcomes for those most in need, for generations to come.