Risk drift is the slow accumulation of warning signals in a resident's care record that, individually, each look manageable but together indicate a deteriorating situation. A fall last Tuesday. A refusal to eat on Thursday. A note about lethargy on Saturday. Each reviewed in isolation; none escalated.
Care-Meter's risk drift detection scans across approved records and flags when patterns are forming, so the manager sees the cluster, not just the individual event.
Quality statement gaps and priority reviews
How it works
After notes are approved through the manager review queue, the governance engine analyses the approved record set for each resident, looking for signal clusters: repeated falls, medication refusals, weight or appetite changes, pressure damage progression, and other Regulation 12-relevant patterns.
When a pattern crosses a governance threshold, a GovernanceFlag is raised and routed to the Exception Inbox. The flag names the pattern, the affected resident, the relevant records, and the suggested care-plan review action.
The manager reviews the flag, takes action (care plan review, escalation, incident creation), and marks the flag resolved with the action taken. The resolution is timestamped in the audit vault.
What it replaces
The end-of-week manual case review: a manager reading through notes for each resident and trying to spot whether anything is trending in the wrong direction. In a 30-bed home, that's an hour of cognitive work that often happens reactively, after the escalation, not before.
Regulatory grounding
Regulation 12 (Safe Care and Treatment) requires providers to assess the risk of harm and take measures to mitigate it. Risk drift detection produces evidence of a proactive risk-monitoring system: the home didn't wait for a serious incident. It caught the pattern and acted.
It also supports Regulation 17 (Good Governance): the Exception Inbox and governance flag record show that the provider has a system for monitoring, identifying, and responding to risks, not just recording care.
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Risk Drift Detection is available on Care-Meter Govern (£249/home/month) and Inspect (£349/home/month) plans.
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