Adult Social Care use of BEAM/Magic Notes

Adult Social Care are undertaking a short project to trial an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool called Magic Notes by Beam.  Magic Notes is a web-based tool and it will be on Social Care Practitioners' mobile phones that are provided by Camden Council.

Social Care Practitioners will use Magic Notes to record conversations with residents, carers, provider staff and others involved in the delivery of services to residents.  

The conversations will be transcribed by Magic Notes, using a Large Language Model (computer program), and based on built-in prompts agreed with Camden Council, it will create a summary of the conversation and a list of actions.  The prompts are designed to extract relevant parts of the conversation, depending on the nature of the meeting.  

The project aims to:

• reduce manual typing up of conversation notes
• improve the recording of notes
• deliver better reviews and creation of care plans in a timely way
• improve data quality and security by removing paper transportation between social care practitioners’ homes and the office.    

The project will involve the processing of personal information, health information and care needs. This will depend on what the person on the call says. Once the social care practitioner has checked the outputs from Magic Notes, the data will be stored on Adult Social Care's existing case management system (Mosaic). 

After one month, the recording on Magic Notes is deleted by Beam.   All the information processed by Magic Notes is processed in the UK.

The legal basis is:

• For personal data Article 6 (1) (e) processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest 
• Special category data (sensitive data) Article 9 (2):
  • (b) Employment, social security and social protection (if authorised by law) with the Data Protection Act 2018 Schedule 1 part 1 condition being para 2 health or social care purposes
  • (g)  processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest with the Data Protection Act 2018 Schedule 2 Part 2 conditions being para 6 Statutory and government purposes, para 18 Safeguarding purposes, and para 19 Safeguarding the economic well-being of vulnerable adults with the underlying law for all being Care Act, Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 and Localism Act 2011; 
  • (h) Health or social care with the Data Protection Act 2018 Schedule 1 part 1 condition being para 1 employment, social security and social protection with the underlying law being as above. 
• Criminal offence data will include any offence details given to us in respect of safeguarding matters and may include information about suspected offences.  The Article 10 requirements are met by the Article 6 condition as for personal data and the Data Protection Act conditions as for special category data. 

How will people be informed when Magic Notes is being used?

People will be told at the outset of a call if it is being recorded using Beam/Magic Notes.  Whilst the legal basis is not consent, the legal basis of public task allows an objection to be made.  If anyone objects to the use of Beam/Magic Notes at the start of a call then it will not be used. 

However if a recording is in progress when an objection is made, the recording will stop at that point but the recording made up to that point will be used otherwise the meeting will have been ineffective.

There is a full Data Privacy Impact Assessment, published on Open Data.