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You might explore home care software based on a specific pain point or set of needs. But what else are you missing out on? Our blog explores.

Many home care providers select their home care software based on a specific need. It might be a need to implement a friends and family portal, digitise their services or more efficiently handle financial management. But home care software can carry a multitude of benefits to home care providers. Whilst addressing specific needs is important, taking a step back and considering the while picture can result in tangible benefits being delivered across your care services. This blog will examine the top 7 features you should look for when examining home care software solutions.

What is home care software?

To begin with, what is home care software? It’s the software that should support every area of your home care delivery. Where client records were recorded and stored on paper, home care software makes the process digital. This makes your services more agile, with the ability to record information on the go, interact with care workers and their schedules, create friends and family portals for your clients and record and share data easily.

Why do I need home care software?

Home care software can deliver a multitude of benefits to your home care services. Perhaps most importantly, however, your clients expect a modern service. Being able to offer outward facing services such as a friends and family portal, updated with real-time information, helps to reassures your clients and their loved ones.

No less important is the consideration of data security. Our previous blog explored the topic of cyber security for home care providers. In short, keeping the data process safe is important from a GDPR and CQC inspection standpoint.

Not only does the CQC want evidence that you’re processing and storing data safely in line with its data security and protection toolkit, but the regulator will also need straightforward access to your data to perform inspections. Being able to easily generate accurate and up-to-date reports from your data is something home care software can support.

What if I don’t need a home care software solution?

Home care software is an important consideration as your business grows. If you’re only caring for a small number of clients with a small number of care workers to manage, then the outlay might not make sense for your business.

As your business grows, however, the complexity of your operation will grow with it. With more clients, more carers and more considerations, it becomes increasingly unmanageable where you rely on manual ways of working. Staying on top of finances, client needs, scheduling, reporting and maintaining an outstanding level of care provision can quickly become overwhelming. Home care software can help you by automating swathes of your business, supporting effective communication and the ongoing delivery of outstanding care.

What you need from a home care software solution

1.Care planning

From onboarding clients into your services to being agile in the face of their shifting needs, your home care software solution should support you in creating, revising and delivering person-centred care plans bespoke to the needs of each client. Being adaptable is key. Demands can change in an instant, so your service needs to be responsive. Your carers also need up-to-date information on each client, ensuring they deliver the right care at the right time,

2. Scheduling your care workers

Once your care plans are established, you need to schedule care workers to deliver them. Home care management software can remove much of the guesswork in scheduling, helping you to respond instantly to short-term changes. This keeps your services on track, makes the most efficient use of your resources and delivers your care plans in the most effective way. From matching the needs of the client to the skills and experience of the care worker, home care software can support you in delivering continuity of care by ensuring that the right people are in the right place at the right time.

3. Record information and communicate in real time

A good home care software solution should provide you with a care worker app. This can be easily downloaded onto the carer’s mobile device and used to complete care visits. As well as equipping your carers with vital context and information on each visit, a care worker app should further support lone worker safety and provide real-time information back to the office. This supports care workers in going about their tasks with confidence, whilst also supporting them in capturing and recording outcomes as they go, removing the need to write up notes and manual data entry.

4. Complete financial management

Having confidence that your care worker pay and funder billing are accurate is essential to the financial health of your home care service. By linking to your care plans and care worker schedules, understanding what has been delivered, home care software can support you in maintaining accurate records of who has done what, when. You can further create timesheets for your care workers, making it easy and accurate for them to log care visits and any travel expenses incurred. By automating much of the process, home care software can reduce friction and human error in your financial management.

5. Create reports on your care services easily

Being able to easily and accurately report on your home care services provides valuable insights on your business. It’s also important for CQC inspections, not least as the first stage of most inspections will be virtual. A good home care software system should provide your service with bespoke dashboards for each user, enabling them to interact with the information they need. When you need insights, they should be easy to obtain from the data you hold across your care services.

6. Friends and family portal

Communicating with your clients and their loved ones is an important and reassuring aspect of modern care delivery. By linking to your care plans and schedules, care software systems can create bespoke, real-time portals through which your clients and their loved ones can see the schedule of their care visits, care due to be administered and care administered.

7. Support, security and compliance

It’s important to consider the team behind your home care software solution. What security certificates do they possess? What ongoing support will you receive with the software? What’s the system uptime availability? How will your data be handled? Given the importance of selecting the right home care software solution, it’s imperative to consider the whole package and select a partner that can support the needs of your business.

How Certa from CACI can support your care service

Certa from CACI is a complete home care management software solution designed to support every facet of care delivery. Whatever support you need in enhancing the delivery of your care services, Certa can help.

Delivering tangible benefits to homecare services by making compliance, consent, auditing, reporting and care plan provision straightforward and streamlined, what difference can Certa make to your homecare services?

You can find out more by booking a no-obligation demo of Certa today.

Running a home care service is complicated enough without throwing the modern concern of cyber security into the mix. This blog will take a closer look at how you can easily, efficiently and effectively manage cyber security in your care service. It doesn’t need to be as complicated, expensive and time consuming as you might assume.

Care services process vast amounts of personal and sensitive data, bringing them under the scope of regulations such as GDPR. Managing cyber security can be a daunting prospect. With a language seemingly all of its own, from phishing and malware to multi-factor authentication and encryption, it can be tricky to navigate for those without a technological background. We will explore how cyber security can be easily managed by care providers. We’ll break down the various considerations and look at simple, effective means of managing it.

What is cyber security and how does it affect care providers?

To begin with, a quick explainer on what cyber security is. Cyber security is the function of protecting the devices we use, such as computers and smartphones, and the services we access via them, from theft and malicious intent.

For example, if you or one of your care workers loses or has their smartphone stolen, you need to have measures in place to prevent access to sensitive information on the device. This covers everything from banking apps to your care plans. We’ll look at how this can be easily achieved.

Why is cyber security important for care providers?

Care providers process and record a lot of sensitive, personal information on the clients in their care. It is essential that this data is protected from theft, misuse or breach. Everything from the names, addresses and care records of your clients – anything that makes them identifiable – is considered sensitive information.

Processing this information is essential to the smooth running of your services. You need to be able to inform your care workers of the care they need to provide with each visit. You will also need to be able to share such information with other care providers and the NHS where necessary.

Sharing information extends to the CQC, too. With in-person inspections from the regulator becoming more infrequent, you may be asked to submit evidence electronically for assessment, the result of which may or may not be an in-person inspection. Being able to handle and share the data securely is paramount. CACI’s Certa care management software supports this with a dedicated CQC reporting feature which is designed to help you record, sort and share data easily and securely.

What do care providers need to consider with regards to cyber security?

Confidentiality: all client information, from names and addresses to care plans and medications, must be protected in line with GDPR. Deploying a CMS such as Certa, with an app for your carers to access client data through, is critical for minimising risk and GDPR compliance.

Data minimisation: consider what data you need for services and remove that which you don’t.

Encryption: how are care workers and clients accessing the information that you hold? Securing devices with strong password and two-factor authentication helps to protect your data.

Access controls: ensure only appropriate people can access information on your clients, restricting access across your organisations with role-based permissions.

Staff training: making all your staff aware of cyber security threats is imperative, from phishing email attacks to securing their devices correctly.

System security: staying on top of installing software updates and security patches is essential.

Cyber security and your CQC inspections

It’s vital to grasp the significant regulatory expectations care services operate under. The Care Quality Commission’s Single Assessment Framework, for instance, scrutinises how data is kept safe and managed securely, particularly under the ‘Well-led’ Quality Statement concerning governance, management and sustainability. This isn’t a vague aspiration; there are clear expectations that robust arrangements for the availability, integrity and confidentiality of data, records and data management systems are in place.

Failing to meet these standards, which are intrinsically linked to the Data Protection Act 2018 (incorporating GDPR), isn’t just a procedural hiccup. It can directly impact your CQC assessment and rating.

The CQC explicitly expects providers to comply with the Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT) or an equivalent, considering it a minimum for a ‘good’ provider. Ignoring these responsibilities isn’t an option if you want to avoid potentially severe consequences, from hefty fines issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office to the kind of reputational damage that erodes the trust of those you care for and their families. In today’s digital-first world, overlooking robust data security is a direct risk to the sustainability of your service and, most critically, to the safety and privacy of the vulnerable people you support.

Making cyber security simple for care providers

Whilst cyber security is a vital consideration for every care service, there is an array of complicated terminologies that can bewilder anyone – especially when your focus is firmly set on delivering outstanding person-centred care to your clients.

If you’re managing a care service, there are enough plates to keep spinning without the added headache of data security. It can be tempting to ignore it and focus on what your service is designed to deliver. The good news is that securing your data is a lot simpler than you might think.

Choosing the right care management software can drastically reduce the burden of cyber security for you and your care service. Modern software is designed with cyber security in mind.

If you haven’t already, digitising your care service is a vital first step. If you’re reliant on paper records, whilst they might not be compromised via malicious emails and lost smartphones, what happens if your office is burgled or there’s a fire? Recovering that data is impossible.

Then there are those services using a hybrid system of paper records, Word and Excel documents. Where multiple systems are being used, even if they are digital, there are risks to your data in not maintaining sensitive data is one, secure location. Where records are being emailed around, there is further risk of interception and incorrect recipients which will compromise your data security.

How Certa can make cyber security easy for you

At CACI, we understand that protecting sensitive data isn’t just a technical requirement. It’s fundamental to delivering quality care. That’s why, as a care management software provider with more than 20 years sector experience, cyber security is at the very heart of what we do.

CACI’s approach is ‘secure by design,’ meaning robust protection is built into our software from the outset. CACI has all the relevant security certificates to support its work, including ISO20000, ISO27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus to support this.

To simplify that, it means that we’re experts in processing and securing data, something you can benefit from with our care management software solution, Certa.

At a time when everyone expects to interact with services digitally on demand, Certa is designed to achieve this. From storing client information to making it available to carers, clients and their loved ones, act with confidence that your data security is handled with Certa.

For more information and to book a demo, please visit: https://www.caci.co.uk/certa.

7 must have features in home care software