There are plenty of software systems that gather quantitative data for financial and funder reporting, but do organisations know what impact they are making? How much information do they have on client outcomes? That question prompted Scott Pearson to come up with Noted – a client management product for health and social care providers.
He set up Noted after a career involving computer animation and acupuncture. “I began in computer animation in Germany in the early 1990s. Back in New Zealand in the 2000s we developed software to make character animation much easier. Our product CAT was adopted by animation studios and game developers around the world.”
After the sale of CAT in 2005, he changed direction completely – studying acupuncture, which led to his interest in outcome data. “Were people getting better? Clinical trials are one thing, but real life is quite different. How could clinicians easily capture useful outcome data in their notes?”
Pearson found that entering outcome data in separate instruments wasn’t a very practical solution for workers. “It had to be easier for health and social care practitioners to capture information within their everyday workflow.”
Pearson looked for someone to build him the system he had in mind. “I couldn’t find anyone, so I taught myself JavaScript and built the initial prototype myself.”
Co-founding a 9 bed acupuncture clinic in Wellington, he validated an early version of the note-taking product by using it with his colleagues. Pearson then raised seed capital and moved into Noted full time at the beginning of 2017. “While I began with acupuncture, I knew Noted needed to work for any type of practitioner. Early customers included dietitians, osteopaths, physiotherapists, and a skin cancer specialist.
At the end of 2017, Noted attracted the interest of Dementia New Zealand affiliates. This led to new features being added including reporting, tags, and a group notes feature, where session records automatically flowed into the notes of individual clients.
In 2018, adoption by secondary school guidance counsellors led to an increased focus on mental health and access controls were added so customers had better control over who could access specific information.
Noted provides health and social care providers with a unified, extendable platform that can be easily tailored to their organisations. The scalable system supports allied health practitioners working in private practices, right up to complex iwi health providers with many teams and hundreds of staff to efficiently deliver care to their people.
“Working with the Ngāti Hine Health Trust, Te Tai Tokerau’s largest Māori health provider, we greatly extended Noted to support the workflow of complex organisations, with outcome tracking, a whānau feature and enterprise reporting.”
Ngāti Hine Health Trust Chief Executive Geoff Milner said they’d been looking for a solution that easily connected and managed their many whānau, services and contracts. “When we looked at Noted, we were blown away by how it would allow us to manage the care of our whānau from a unified system while also allowing us to capture and report on the data we need, including our progress towards key strategic goals.”
Pearson sums up Noted as “cool stuff we build so that people can work well together, capturing useful information quickly and easily, seeing only the data they need to see, while overcoming the disconnects caused by siloed data, ultimately reducing the load on staff so they can look after people better.”
Where to from here? Pearson says there’s a common theme emerging – mental health. Most of Noted’s customers are delivering services related to counselling, psychology and mental health and addiction. Especially considering Noted’s tools and experience supporting providers who work with support groups and families, he is excited about the opportunities presented offshore, in particular in the Australian and US markets.