Business challenge and opportunity

According to Lars Saether, Founder and CEO of Care Safety Innovations (CSI), roughly 70% of the thousands who retire daily in the U.S. and U.K. will need some form of regular assisted care. “Hospitals, care homes, and public institutions lack necessary capacity” Lars says. “As a result, essential care increasingly happens at home.”

Simultaneously, there is a shortage of home care providers to help with daily living, and home health care providers who offer medical services. Lars’ vision for CSI focuses on the challenges for both kinds of providers, whose teams are already overwhelmed by dual responsibilities. The companies must train and manage care staff with varying professional readiness, and they must also demonstrate compliance with government-mandated requirements and standards.

Care providers are often one reported incident from being bogged down by a time-consuming “safeguarding” process—an official inquiry that requires formal interviews, evaluations, and official rulings. For some providers, such incidents occur regularly.

There is in fact an alarming trend of abuse in elder care. Catalysts for abuse include under-trained and increasingly overworked care workers coming into regular contact with difficult and vulnerable care recipients, in a situation without objective oversight. As of 2026, most care providers still rely on care notes written by care workers after a home visit.

Research helped Lars zero in on what care service businesses most needed to succeed: the capacity to provide and scale quality care, protect everyone involved, and efficiently demonstrate compliance, all without needing to hire and train a great number of people.

With that view of what care providers needed, Lars’ set a goal to build a cutting-edge, globally scalable digital platform for managing care operations end to end.

Technical challenge

An end-to-end solution had to cover care planning, objective documentation and oversight, compliance, and back-office administration.

Early start-up work on prototypes with a small group of developers in Norway soon revealed that CSI needed advanced technology expertise to design and build the application Lars envisioned.

Enter Anders Bjørnrud. Anders came on board as CTO through conversations Lars had with Philip Lundberg at Kyndryl, which was already CSI’s partner for setting up and managing infrastructure and operations.

The scope and complexity of creating CSI's provider and recipient care workflows called for the resources and flexibility provided by a premier cloud platform. Anders and Philip decided on Microsoft Azure because of their previous success running development and operations (DevOps) pipelines on the platform.

Anders and Philip also anticipated the need to use a range of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to prove that some key features in CSI’s application could work. Microsoft Azure had a full AI suite for CSI to leverage from within their pipelines as part of creating and continuously evolving the modules of the application Lars and team had in mind.

Finally, success for CSI depended on having a team with both cloud development expertise and experience with AI. “And in Kyndryl we found just that,” Lars says. A trip to the Kyndryl Collaborative in India convinced Lars and Anders that the talent there was a perfect fit to perform CSI’s software development and manage operations. “That’s when we understood our that visions and functions actually could be translated into functional solutions for us and for our clients,” Lars shares.

Our solution

Together, CSI and Kyndryl designed and built the Vita Care Companion iCON (VCC iCON), an AI-driven, globally scalable platform to manage care administration and operations end to end. Core capabilities include:

• Care assessment and planning. On a mobile device, the application records and dynamically guides a care provider’s intake specialist in assessing need and risk for the care recipient. At the end of the interview, AI automatically generates a care plan with a digital checklist for a care worker to use during visits.
• Scheduling. Based on the care plan, level of training among care workers, and GPS-aware mapping, the VCC iCON applies AI to match care recipients with possible care givers. This saves care workers much time and energy. The VCC iCON efficiently guides them through the day from visit to visit.
• Observability and reporting. VCC iCON uses AI to create a transcript and generate an official care note from the audio and video recorded during a visit. Any incident during the visit—a fall, for example—automatically flags the care note for office review so that the care provider can proactively notify authorities as needed. Along with an objective record of each visit, care providers receive a prioritized list of the care notes to review. Family members of care recipients also get access to the visit recordings, giving them the peace of mind that comes from staying connected as an observer and advocate throughout the continuity of care.
• Emergency assistance. As needed, a button in the mobile application immediately puts a trained non-professional in contact with a healthcare expert at the care provider’s office. Care providers gain 24/7 support for their sometimes-temporary care staff, reducing errors and resolving challenges before they escalate.
• Data privacy. Zero trust security safeguards ensure the VCC iCON complies with data privacy regulations like GDPR in Europe and HIPAA in the United States. Only the care provider and the care recipient can view personal information and data.
• Back-office administration. The VCC iCON automatically generates bills with a detailed accounting of care services provided and recommendations of additional care based on awareness of what is recorded in the month of care notes.

The power of partnership

Microsoft Azure provides the foundation on which the team builds and runs the VCC iCON care management platform. Its unified environment for building, testing and scaling the VCC iCON is crucial to CSI’s success. “We operate everything we have inside Microsoft, and we are squeezing out every bit of value offered by the Azure platform,” Anders explains.

Using Azure DevOps, the Kyndryl development teams run three independent pipelines in parallel to continuously evolve the different VCC iCON modules. That includes using the resources in Microsoft Azure to drive the AI functionality embedded in how VCC iCON guides assessments, generates care plans and care notes, complies with mandatory reporting to authorities, and dynamically schedules care workers.

Role-based controls ensure that CSI complies with regulations to keep sensitive personal information private unless a user is specifically authorized to access. “The only ones seeing care recipient data is the actual care provider,” Anders says. “The Kyndryl developers can't see it, we can't see it, we don't want to see it.”

What progress looks like

So far, early adopters of the VCC iCON provide the best report on CSI’s progress towards enabling excellent home health care at scale.

Performance in the field

Zineera Ghaffar, owner of SuperFast Care, a CSI customer and care provider in the U.K., experienced these benefits¹ in the first 6 months of using the platform:

• 60% faster patient intake — a process that once took up to 6 hours can now be completed to 2 hours or less.
• Care worker attrition is down due to relief from the stress of manual administration during, between and after client visits.
• Administrative costs are lower without need for external consultants in resolving safeguarding cases. VCC iCON automatically provides the documentation to submit for official review.
• SuperFast Care has taken on more clients as a result of the increased safety, security, and operation efficiency provided by the VCC iCON.

Competitive advantage

VCC iCON consolidates and integrates activities that care providers typically require multiple systems to manage. That all-in-one approach has attracted strong interest across the world. In January 2026, based on the VCC iCONs competitive strength with accountability, scalability and regulatory readiness, global industry leader Lois Quom joined CSI’s board as a strategic liaison for business development.

1. This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by Kyndryl at any time without notice. Not all offerings are available in every country in which Kyndryl operates. The performance data and client examples cited are presented for illustrative purposes only.  Actual performance results may vary depending on specific configurations and operating conditions.  Kyndryl products and services are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided.