Certa Archives

7 must have features in home care software

Posted on: 8 July 2025

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.

How to make cyber security simple in your care service

Posted on: 25 June 2025

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.

Caring for the carers: getting the most from your care workforce

Posted on: 17 June 2025

Recruiting care workers is becoming an increasingly difficult and costly operation. Job vacancies in the care industry are plentiful. This affords care workers a greater degree of choice and flexibility in choosing who they work for. So, why should they work for you and your home care service? From salary to working conditions, your service needs to be an attractive proposition to skilled care workers. You then need to have the processes and systems in place to keep them, otherwise the process repeats itself all over, costing you time and money, impacting on service delivery. In this blog we will examine how you can attract and retain care workers, helping to make your care service more effective and efficient.

Why is caring for the carers important to your care service?

It’s an obvious question to ask, but why is caring for your carers so important? If we look at your clients for a moment, continuity of care is vital. It builds rapport, trust and establishes a personal touch to your services. Your clients, at a vulnerable stage of their lives, will appreciate consistency and the presence of carers who they like and who understand their needs.

In a situation where you’re constantly shuffling your pack, bringing agency workers in to plug gaps and recruiting anyone to support service delivery, this vital sense of connection between your clients and your service is quickly lost.

One of the questions the CQC asks as part of its single assessment framework is, are your services caring? Where you have consistent, understanding carers who specialise in the area of care they are administering, it makes answering ‘yes’ to that question – and demonstrating it – much easier.

There’s also a financial element to consider for care services here. With lots of vacancies comes a lot of competition for care workers. If you can attract and retain staff, it minimises your need to recruit. This reduces staff costs and a reliance on more expensive agency staff in delivering your care services. If you look after your care workers, they will look after your clients, which in turn will look after your business. It’s a virtuous circle which reduces costs and administrative headaches.

How can you care for your carers?

We’ve established why it’s so important to care for your carers, but how can you achieve this? Your care service is likely a very busy environment, with a multitude of demands being juggled simultaneously. We’ll look at how you can effectively care for your carers, from their appointment through to, hopefully, a long and successful career with you.

Understand the skills of your carers

Each carer who works in your care services has a unique set of skills and experiences. How can you best deploy them across your clients? Each of your clients, too, has their own unique care needs, so effectively matching your carers to your clients is important.

Assign your carers to tasks they’re passionate about

A continuation of understanding the skills and experiences of your carers is scheduling them to tasks they’re passionate about. Not only will this help to keep your carers happy, it will have a knock-on effect in the care they deliver to your clients. It’s a logical thing to do, but something that can get lost in the maelstrom of administrative tasks faced by registered managers and administrators.

Help your carers develop their careers with you

Every care worker wants to advance their career. It helps them to stay motivated, increase their earning potential and realise their own potential as carers. Providing training opportunities is a great way to support your carers. It helps them to develop and also demonstrates that you’ve got their best interests in mind.

Communication

It sounds simple, but getting communication right between management and carers is crucial. Where you communicate clearly and well, it builds trust and rapport between you and your workforce. Having the means to effectively achieve this is an important consideration. Communication extends beyond on the day, last minute communications, to letting carers know their schedule in advance, equipping them with the relevant information they need for each visit and providing them with a means of recording visits and leaving feedback. This is another aspect to feature on the CQC’s single assessment framework.

Use the right care management software

Technology plays a fundamental role in the success of care services like yours. From onboarding new clients and care workers, to managing finances and care schedules, using care management software that supports your care services is essential. When choosing the best system for your care service it is important to involve your care workers in the decision making process. They will be the ones using it day in, day out, to deliver your services.

How Certa from CACI can help you care for your carers

Certa is a complete care management software solution designed for care providers. It supports every aspect of care delivery, including the scheduling, communication and understanding of your care workforce.

With bespoke dashboards for each office manager and administrator, you can more easily understand the skills and experiences of your carers, match them to tasks and clients that suit them and create continuity in your care services. You can also better identify areas for improvement, suggest training courses and receive feedback from your carers.

Certa can support you in caring for your carers. For more information, visit www.caci.co.uk/certa/.

Digital home care software – complicated distraction or care service necessity?

Posted on: 15 May 2025

The rise of technology has been inexorable this century, from widespread internet adoption to the ubiquitous presence of smartphones. The advances are clear, but with so much on offer, choosing the right solutions can feel like guesswork. It can be like heading to your local DIY store to pick up some white paint; there are at least 37 different options. Which one do you choose? The process of digitising social care and utilising digital home care software to underpin and support your care services can feel exactly the same.

It can be a challenge in identifying your own needs sometimes, too. Your current process might work for you, but you can accept that it’s inefficient versus what the rest of the market is using. You don’t want to miss out, but at the same time you don’t want to commit to spending time and money on a solution which provide the answer to a question you weren’t asking.

To help, CACI recently launched a white paper, The top seven features you need from your care management software. It’s free to download here.

In this article we’re going to look at the importance of digital home care software and the difference that technology can make to care providers, their clients and their staff.

Digital home care software to support care providers

The rise of digital has touched every area of care provision. Peter Skinner, programme director for Digitising Social Care, noted in 2024 that some 70% of care providers have a digital social care record. That number is expected to surpass 80% in 2025.

Recording and maintaining digital care records is crucial for a number of reasons:

Record information at source in a uniform manner across your services
Easily search for records
Use data gathered to report on your care services
Understand the skills and experiences of your care workers
Share information with external agencies, such as the NHS and other care providers, easily
Provide a friends and family portal with real-time information
Keep your records securely in one place
Make data gathering for inspections easy
Comply with regulations such as GDPR
Easily recover data in the case of a disaster event – you can’t recover paper records if an event such a fire occurs

With the right technology in place, care providers can enhance the service they provide to clients. With a digital record, it removes duplication of questions, with each care worker able to access a single source of the truth. There’s no more waiting for care records and their information to be manually logged in the office. Rather, such information can simply be captured at source on a mobile device.

Digital home care software to support care workers

With a single source of the truth, your care workers can then administer the right care at the right time. With full visibility of previous care provided and a robust and reliable record of each client’s bespoke needs, you can reduce the risk of error and duplication.

Digitisation can also support more efficient and effective care worker scheduling. With a central record of care workers as well as clients, you can match the skills and experiences of care workers to the needs of clients. Does a care worker have a good relationship with a particular client? Do they have more experience catering for certain needs?

You can further plan the route of their care visits to make the most efficient use of their time, potentially facilitating more care visits from a single shift.

As your care workers complete their care visits, they can simply record the outcomes of each visit via their mobile device. No need to write down notes, carry them with them and submit them to the office. This reduces the administrative burden on care workers, freeing them to focus on what they’re good at – delivering outstanding care to your clients.

None of this can be achieved without digitising social care and your provision of it.

Digital home care software to support your clients

In the modern day, clients, as well as their friends and family, expect an interactive service. This cannot be achieved with manual data entry, paper records and an inability to share information beyond the walls of the office.

When digitising your care services, you open up new opportunities such as friends and family portals. These can display to your clients and their loved ones the status of their care, what has been administered and planned visits.

This also makes it easier to communicate with your clients where short-term exceptions arise. If, for example, one of your care workers is unable to fulfil their shift that day, you can communicate this clearly and make clear what you are doing to reschedule or rearrange the care visit.

With digitised care records, you can also share and receive information on clients. If a client is joining your care service from somewhere else, being able to receive all of their information and history of care gives you invaluable insight whilst preparing for them. Similarly, outgoing clients can be supported in their next setting in the same way.

There is also vital information to be recorded in those instances when clients leave your care services and receive treatment in an NHS or other setting such as a hospital.

Whilst the sharing of data between the NHS and care providers is far from seamless, it can only be achieved and improved upon with the digitisation of social care and digital care records. This link can make a tangible difference to your clients, helping to return them to a residential setting as soon as possible. This minimises disruption to their lives and your care services.

Conclusion

Digitisation isn’t going away. The advances have been too rapid and too all-encompassing for there to be any scope to row back on it. It is, therefore, essential that you digitise your care services and ask the right questions in selecting care management software providers.

Our white paper looks at the top features you need:

Care planning
Rostering
Mobile app
Financial management
Reporting
Friends and family portal
Support, security and compliance

Hopefully it offers some guidance as to what you can expect from care management software and how it can support you in digitising your care records.

The technology landscape is rapidly changing. So, you might have a solution in place that no longer supports all of your needs. If you’re looking to go digital for the first time or are looking at your next software solution for your care service, please visit www.caci.co.uk/certa for more information on how CACI can support you.

Certa at The Care Show London 2025: Innovation, insight and the future of care

Posted on: 14 May 2025

Two weeks ago, CACI’s Certa team attended one of the largest celebrations of the care sector, The Care Show London 2025. The event brought together care providers, tech innovators and policymakers to explore the future of social care. The use of AI, both good and bad, was one of the hot topics of the event, along with a . This blog takes a closer look at the key topics we found most interesting at the Care Show London 2025.

Generative AI in social care: the Oxford initiative of the responsible use of AI in social care and onwards

This thought-provoking session by Daniel Casson (Digital Transformation Advisor at Casson Consulting), Katie Thorn (Project Lead at Digital Care Hub), and Dr. Caroline Green (Early Careers Research Fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI, University of Oxford), delved into the pros, cons and ethical considerations of introducing AI into social care. Much of their talk centred on the use of large language models (LLMs) and concerns with how their use fits in with the values of person-centred care.

To combat this, the talk covered how The Digital Care Hub will soon release official guidance on the responsible use of AI in care settings. This included examining why technology suppliers need to pledge their commitment to creating ethical, collaborative solutions that genuinely serve the care community.

A point that was stressed at the Care Show London 2025 was the need for close alignment with the CQC and the Department of Health and Social Care, to ensure AI is applied responsibly. Dr. Caroline Green gave a memorable analogy to explain AI’s predictive nature: if someone goes to the pub every Thursday, eventually their phone might suggest a message like, “Going down the pub, will be back late,” highlighting how AI learns through pattern recognition, not understanding.

Daniel Carson rounded off the session by urging AI developers to consider both the care workforce and the care recipient, ensuring AI meets the needs of all stakeholders.

Outstanding at home: transforming quality in domiciliary care

This session at the Care Show London 2025 from Caroline Cosh (Director at The OS & Clifton Home Care), Rob Hargreaves (Information Service Manager at Skills For Care) and Patricia Conteh (Head of Clinical Services at Prestige Nursing & Care), focused on how to raise standards in home-based care. A particular emphasis of the talk was on how businesses can achieve an ‘outstanding’ rating from the CQC.

Key actionable takeaways for home care providers included:

Maintaining clear evidence logs
Capturing positive client feedback
Demonstrating strong safeguarding practices
Providing robust documentation and audit trails
Preparing for both service-led and leadership-focused inspections

It was a valuable reminder that proactive, well-documented and values-driven care is essential for both compliance and excellence in a domiciliary setting.

A regulatory lens: CQC’s forward focus unveiled at Care Show London 2025

Another standout moment from the Care Show London 2025 was the keynote from James Bullion CBE (Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care and Integrated Care) at the CQC. His update provided a long-awaited look into the regulatory landscape shaping the future of care.

Bullion acknowledged the backlog of inspections, stressed that the number of inspections is increasing and structural changes are on the horizon. “We’re underway with more inspections, we’re dealing with backlogs and we’re about to make some structural changes in the organisation,” he said, signalling a proactive shift in CQC’s approach, with further announcements expected this summer.

He emphasised the shared responsibility between providers and the regulator, noting: “It is in our joint interest for there to be a strong regulator that works effectively so that we can show the public and the government that care is good.”

A major focus for the CQC going forward includes a reshaped leadership structure to bring back sector-specific expertise. The appointment of Sir Julian Hartley as CEO in December, followed by Dr. Arun Chopra as Chief Inspector of Mental Health, marks the beginning of this leadership refresh. New chief inspectors will be responsible for overseeing inspection programmes, enabling faster, more informed decision making.

This update was particularly relevant given the increasing intersection between regulation, technology and person-centred care. This was a recurring theme throughout the event. For providers, the message was clear: being prepared, transparent and responsive to evolving expectations will be key to delivering quality care and achieving compliance in the years ahead.

Final thoughts on the Care Show London 2025

The Care Show London offered a vital glimpse into where social care is heading, from the use of ethical AI and performance enhancing platforms to best-in-class home care delivery. As a team, CACI left feeling inspired by the people and ideas driving innovation across the sector.

“With Certa, we’re committed to supporting the transformation of home care companies through tools that empower teams, streamline care processes and improve outcomes for everyone involved. Attending The Care Show reinforced just how vital innovation is to the future of care. We’re proud to be part of that journey.” Greg Ayles, Director, Certa