The 8 best care management platforms for 2024

All information correct as of August 2024

So you’re looking to take your domiciliary care business digital? Or perhaps you already use software to manage and deliver care, but are ready for a change in 2024? Check out the 8 best care management platforms for 2024 below, along with some useful information on how to choose the right one for you, and what some of the advantages of going digital can be.

What is a care management platform? 

A ‘care management platform’ is a piece of software that helps care providers manage operations more efficiently. This can often include a desktop toolkit for administrators, care managers and coordinators and a mobile app for care professionals and family members. 

Care management solutions always include care planning and management: this allows you to create and manage care plans for service users, document care delivery, record observations and assessments, and monitor service user progress. Beyond that, these platforms can include many other products and features that cover almost every corner of your operations. These include: 

• Scheduling and rostering: Allows you to create and manage staff schedules and rosters, assign staff members to service users, and track staff availability and attendance.
• Invoicing and payroll: Streamlines billing and invoicing processes, tracks payments, and manages payroll.
• Compliance and auditing: Allows you to monitor your care delivery and make sure you're maintaining high standards, also great when it comes to showcasing evidence for a regulatory body or local authority tenders
• Workforce experience: Gives you the ability to store employee documents (such as right-to-work paperwork and onboarding records) as well as regularly communicate with your care teams in the field
• Communication: Allows you and your teams to easily share important information with a service user's wider 'care circle', such as emergency services and family members
• Analytics: Empowers you and your teams to use the mountains of care data you're entering every day to spot trends, see red flags and make smart decisions off the back of them.

Care management software also provides a secure environment for storing data, allowing providers to access information quickly and easily - making meeting and demonstrating regulatory standards a much lighter lift. That’s why NHS England refers to care management platforms as Digital Social Care Records!

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What are the advantages of care management platforms?

Care management platforms, and going digital in general, can be a transformative experience for care businesses. 

They provide a simple way to get a clear overview across every aspect of care delivery - meaning safeguarding, person-centred care and response times are almost guaranteed to improve. Team retention can also get better, as registered managers, co-ordinators and admins are able to pick up on missed visits and alerts much faster, and can connect with the care professionals on the ground to resolve issues together. 

Regulatory ratings and inspections also become much easier, as managing and pulling key evidence becomes less of a dreaded chore and more of a simple lift. 

Finally, costs are often reduced overall - whether through increased visibility over the business, improved ratings leading to more opportunities or even reducing the amount spent on printer ink! 

All of this supports stability, peace-of-mind and general business growth.

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Who is care management software suitable for?

Care management software is widely used across the UK care sector to enhance operational efficiency and ensure the highest standards of care. Here’s a closer look at who benefits from this essential technology:

1. Large care businesses: These organisations include the likes of Home Instead or Alina, who manage multiple facilities and services: care management software helps them streamline processes, maintain compliance, and provide consistent care across all locations.

2. Independent care homes: Smaller, family-run residential care businesses use care management platforms to efficiently manage daily operations, reduce administrative burdens, and focus more on providing care.

3. Specialty care providers: Facilities dedicated to specific types of care—such as dementia, mental health, or disability support—rely on these systems to address unique needs, track patient progress, and improve care outcomes.

4. Home care agencies: Businesses that provide in-home care services use care management software to schedule visits, manage care plans, and keep families informed. This ensures that clients receive consistent and reliable care in the comfort of their own homes.

5. Local Government and Councils: Local authorities responsible for overseeing community care services also use care management software to monitor the quality of care delivered by various service providers within their jurisdiction.

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What features should you look for in a care management platform?

Choosing the right care management platform is a big decision - and getting the right features can make all the difference. Here are a few pointers of what you should look for when researching and reviewing your different options: 

1. Strong care planning capabilities

• Tools that allow for the creation and management of care plans tailored to individual client needs. 
• Full client profiles that allow carers and care managers to keep an ongoing patient-centred record 
• A well-designed mobile app to give carers real-time access to client information, care plans, and other critical data, regardless of their location. This should be easy for them to use in order to give full records of task completion, as well as punctuality. 
• A means to manage day-to-day communication between care office and carer, cutting down on wasted time and ensuring a clear paper trail for inspection purposes 
• Integrated eMAR so your team can manage the critical tasks of medication administration 
• Alerting so that issues can be resolved quickly

2. Smart scheduling and rostering

• Flexible scheduling tools that can accommodate changes easily 
• The ability to match carers with clients in a way that optimises both continuity of care and carer efficiency
• The ability to automatically adjust runs in line with travel time in order maximise efficiency 

3. Finance and workforce management

• The ability to invoice (including where multiple payers contribute to an individual client’s care) 
• The ability to run payroll for your carers, including making adjustments for National Minimum Wage 
• Support employee engagement through managing onboarding documents and right-to-work records

4. Data, data, data

• The ability to create reports to analyse where how your business is performing
• The ability to securely and compliantly share key data with relevant third parties

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How to choose your care management platform

Choosing the right care management platform can help you increase employee satisfaction and retention rates, improve your regulatory rating, strengthen all aspects of your business and ultimately help you grow your business and profit. However, the wrong care management platform may cause even more issues than it solves - this is why it’s so important to find the right one for you and your team.

Despite all being in the same industry, every care business has different needs when it comes to the technology provider that best fits them. Here are some simple ways to break down how to choose a care management platform that’s right for you.

Return on investment

If you’re taking your very first steps into digital care management tools, it can be tempting to think ‘I’ll take the cheapest route possible and see if it works for me’ or ‘I’ll just use the simplest possible tools to get used to it’. This can work out ok if you or your care team has experience with similar technology, but a budget solution can end up costing more in the long run due to system errors, incompatibility, poor support and limited features. Ask your potential care management platform provider if they have any useful data around long term cost saving vs the price of their tools, and find a balance that works for you.

Available features

Depending on the size and complexity of your business and the services you offer, you may need less (or much more specific) features in your care management software. For example, for very small businesses who only offer personal care, then a set of simple care management tools to get yourselves up and running may work well - for providers that offer complex care, live-in care, are part of a franchise or that simply have ambitions to offer those things, then it is worth making sure that the care management platform you choose can cater for all of your needs. 

It is also worth noting that software suppliers that cover a very wide range of healthcare industry needs beyond domiciliary care (such as hospitals, GPs, residential etc) will often be covering multiple areas at once, and therefore may not have as much resource to focus on your specific set of needs.

Uptime and security

The uptime (the time a system is working and available) of your care management platform is crucial when it comes to delivering outstanding care. If your team is relying on a system to provide visit information, track check-ins, raise alerts and update medical records then it needs to have a great track record of being available at all times. Additionally, it also needs to have the highest security standards possible. A good way to check for these factors is to either ask the platform directly while having a demo or look on their website for their data or security certifications.

Ratings and reviews

Ratings and reviews are a good way to find out if a care management platform is right for you. By looking through Trustpilot, Facebook, Google and app store reviews, you can pick up on features or concerns that you can then ask about during a demo. 

Investment and support

Check to see how much recent investment the technology provider has had, or how often they are building and releasing new features. This can be a good indicator of how up-to-date the software is, and how future proof it will be as you grow your business. Alongside this, find out how happy people have been with the support offered - if reviews seem to suggest it’s all automated, hard to get a hold of people or that it’s unhelpful then that could be another sign that the business is not prioritising their customers.

Ease-of-use and onboarding

Finally, this point can make or break a care management platform. It’s normal for people to feel nervous about switching to new technology, especially if they are of a demographic that is less used to different softwares and platforms for their everyday life. This is why it’s important to assess how easy-to-use and intuitive the care management platform is - and how much support there is when it comes to onboarding. If there seems to be a simple, smart way to get moving quickly - like free training, workshops or an online academy - then this can be a good sign.

Read also - Top 10 Care Platforms with the Best Support

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The top 8 best care management platforms 

Here are some of the best care management platforms available, with some brief descriptions to help you get an overview of what they offer. 

Birdie

Website: birdie.care

NHS England Assured Supplier? Yes

Brief description:

Birdie: Purpose-built for domiciliary care providers, Birdie is everything you need to run your care business - from care management and rostering, to finance and auditing - made easier, faster and safer with the power of data. Most homecare technology does a great job of digitising processes: it turns notes into clicks, paper into docs and calls into texts. At Birdie, we believe that this isn’t enough.

The care sector has ever-increasing demand and ever-dwindling resources: taking paper processes and putting them on a screen doesn’t solve the essential problem of ‘there’s never enough time, there’s never enough people’.

That’s where Birdie is different to other homecare technology: we make the business of caring easier, faster and safer with the power of data.

Data-powered technology gives you the power of insight and automation, so it’s easy to make smart decisions and act on them:

• you’ll not just fix medication problems, you’ll spot them instantly
• you’ll know where you stand with the CQC…before the CQC does
• you’ll know your roster is efficient, because it’s auto-allocated to match skills and travel time

Birdie spoke to real Care Professionals at Alina Homecare to see how they find using Birdie:

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Access

Website:  theaccessgroup.com

NHS England Assured Supplier? Yes

Brief description:

Access is a cloud-based care management platform. As well as homecare providers, Access covers a very wide range of healthcare providers. For domiciliary care, it provides features such as scheduling, billing, reporting, and analytics, and also offers a range of tools for managing client information, tracking visits and activities, and monitoring staff performance.

Carebeans Care Software

Website: carebeans.co.uk

NHS England Assured Supplier? Yes

Brief description:

Care Beans provides care management software designed to help both residential and domiciliary providers manage their operations. Features include scheduling, client management, reporting, billing & invoicing, and an app for care providers.

Care Control Systems

Website: carecontrolsystems.co.uk

NHS England Assured Supplier? Yes

Brief description:

Supporting both residential and homecare providers, Care Control provides a suite of features to help users manage client information, staff scheduling, invoicing, reporting, and more. It also offers an integrated mobile app for caregivers to access client information on the go. 

Log my Care

Website: logmycare.co.uk

NHS England Assured Supplier? Yes

Brief description:

For both domiciliary and residential care, Log My Care provides a care management platform with a range of features to help a wide variety of care businesses keep track of their clients, manage staff, and manage reporting. Tools include care and support plans, electronic logs and incident management.

Person Centred Software (PCS)

Website: personcentredsoftware.com/en-gb

NHS England Assured Supplier? Yes

Brief description:

Person Centred Software supports a wide range of healthcare providers, including domiciliary care. Features include a care delivery app, care monitoring, care planning and fluid and nutrition management.

CarePlanner

Website: careplanner.co.uk

NHS England Assured Supplier?:  Yes (as part of Nourish)

Brief description: CarePlanner is a care management platform designed to streamline operations for homecare providers. It offers scheduling, rostering, and real-time care tracking, along with tools for managing client records. The platform also includes a mobile app for caregivers, enabling them to access and update care information on the go.

CareDocs

Website: caredocs.co.uk

NHS England Assured Supplier? No

Brief description: CareDocs is a digital care management platform designed for care homes. It includes tools for care planning, daily recording, and compliance management. CareDocs also offers a mobile app for care staff, allowing them to document care activities, view care plans, and monitor patient well-being from anywhere.

Future-proofing your care management platform

Embracing technology is not just an option but a necessity to stay ahead in care. Among these technological advancements, Artificial Intelligence (AI), data analytics, and integration capabilities stand out as pivotal elements for future-proofing care management platforms. These advancements not only streamline operations but also significantly improve the care experience for both care professionals and recipients.

• Personalised Care Plans: AI analyses health data to predict and prevent potential issues, enabling care professionals to tailor their support to each individual's needs.
• Improved Decision-Making: Data analytics offer valuable insights into care outcomes, helping providers identify improvement areas and celebrate successes, fostering an environment of continuous enhancement.
• Enhanced Coordination: Integration capabilities ensure seamless communication between different software systems, leading to a more coordinated and efficient care delivery process.

By embracing these technologies, care providers can ensure their services are not only relevant in today's digital age but also prepared to meet the challenges of tomorrow. This strategic approach to technology adoption can lead to higher satisfaction levels among care recipients, a more supported care professional team, and an overall improvement in care quality.

Want to try Birdie for your business? Hit the demo button below...

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