IT may have been around for three decades, but telecare – helping unwell, disabled or elderly people to live independently by delivering care using remote monitoring and emergency alarms – has not kept up with the times and is still “very reactive”, according to experts.

David Brown, who leads the analogue to digital programme for the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government, said the decommissioning of the old analogue communications infrastructure and its replacement with a digital set-up could make all the difference to the service.

“That programme of work doesn’t have a significant impact on standard telephony users, but for telecare users, for telecare services, it does,” he told an online discussion.

Telecom providers announced the switching off of their old infrastructure – underground copper wires – three years ago. The Scottish Government then commissioned the Digital Office to start work to support health and social care partnerships through their digital journey.

Brown said the number of partnerships involved had grown and they had worked hard to introduce new elements that would not have been possible using analogue, and developed an online repository which had become the “digital telecare playbook”.

“The playbook is really a step-by-step guide for services on how to progress from an analogue to digital model,” he said.

Speaking at a “conversation” organised by Censis – Scotland’s Innovation Centre for sensing, imaging and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies – Brown said local health and social care partnerships provided telecare to around 180,000 people in Scotland, and were looking at ways to innovate and become “smarter”.

“There’s an opportunity with digital telecare to shift services from this reactive into a proactive preventative model,” he added.

Glenda Cook, transformation manager in the Older Person’s Service at Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership, said for service users now telecare looked exactly as it did 20 years ago – “the same button and box scenario”. She said: “For most of us we are already using digital IT for our banking, our shopping, all of that, and when you contrast it with this button and box, it is really desperately old fashioned.

“So it’s hard, I think, to gain traction in younger people and I think it’s been a little bit forgotten for some of the older people.

“One of the biggest challenges I think we have in the public sector is that to move from analogue to digital is potentially extremely expensive and given the current economic climate, we really only have one shot at this.

“If we spend all our capital making the wrong choice … we will be stuck with that for 15 years and … our client base, our service users, will lose out another 15 years of innovation and development.”