Digital care records, care planning, medication management, staffing, and CQC compliance. Built around how your home actually operates.
Running a care home means managing a continuous flow of information. Care plans change daily. Medication rounds need accurate recording. Staff rotas shift. Families want updates. CQC wants evidence. Every piece connects to every other piece, and the consequences of getting it wrong are serious.
At minimum, care home software needs to handle:
More advanced systems also cover occupancy and bed management, supplier and procurement tracking, financial reporting, and integration with pharmacy systems for automated medication ordering.
The UK care home software market is dominated by a handful of providers. Here is an honest look at what is available and what each one actually delivers.
| Provider | What They Offer | Pricing | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Person Centred Software | The largest in the UK. Used by over 8,000 providers. Full digital care system: care planning, eMAR, wellbeing tracking, operations. Comprehensive but complex. | Not publicly disclosed. Subscription-based. Contact for quote. | Large care groups with dedicated IT support and budget for a premium system. |
| Birdie | Modern, well-designed platform focused on domiciliary and home care. Care management, scheduling, medication, finance. Strong mobile app. | From £200/month. Usage-based on care hours. Mandatory implementation package for 300+ care recipients. | Home care and domiciliary providers. Less suited to residential care homes. |
| CareDocs | Stand-alone care planning system. Digital care plans, eMAR, incident reporting. Lower cost, simpler to implement. Used widely by smaller residential providers. | Approximately £1.50 to £3 per resident per month, plus setup fees. | Smaller residential homes looking for a straightforward, affordable system. |
| Nourish | Care management with a focus on person-centred recording. Care plans, handovers, observations, family portal. Clean interface. | Subscription-based. Contact for quote. | Homes that want a modern interface with strong person-centred recording. |
| Log my Care | Free tier available for small providers. Digital care plans, observations, medication. Paid plans add more features. | Free for up to 25 service users. Paid plans from £2/service user/month. | Very small providers or those wanting to try digital records before committing. |
All of these are subscription-based. You pay monthly, indefinitely. The cost compounds over years. A home paying £200 per month for software spends £2,400 per year, £12,000 over five years, and still owns nothing. If you stop paying, you lose access to the system and, in many cases, your data.
The platforms listed above are competent products. But they were all designed for a generalised version of a care home. Your home is not general.
Residential homes operate differently from nursing homes. Dementia care has different recording requirements from learning disability support. A home with 20 beds runs differently from one with 80. A home with an attached day centre has workflows that none of these platforms were built to handle.
What typically happens is this: you adopt the software, discover it does not quite fit how your home works, and you start building workarounds. A spreadsheet for the thing the software cannot track. A whiteboard for the rota because the software's rota feature does not match your shift patterns. A notebook for medication notes that do not fit the system's fields.
The other issue is control. When Person Centred Software or Birdie decides to change their interface, add features you did not ask for, or increase their prices, you have no say. You are renting their system on their terms. Your care records, the most sensitive data your business holds, live on their servers under their control.
A bespoke system starts with your home. Not a template. Not a product demo. Your actual daily workflow, from handover to medication round to care plan review to family communication to CQC evidence generation.
We sit down with you and map exactly how your home operates. Then we build a system that matches it precisely. The result is software where every screen, every form, and every report reflects the way your staff actually work.
The UK government's position is clear. The Department of Health and Social Care published its "What Good Looks Like" framework in 2023, setting out expectations for digital maturity across adult social care. The NHS England information standard (DAPB4102) defines the minimum data that CQC-registered providers should record digitally.
Four in five care providers have already adopted digital social care records. The direction is unambiguous. CQC inspectors increasingly expect to see digital systems during inspections, and providers still relying entirely on paper records face harder conversations about the quality of their evidence.
This is not a future trend. It is the present reality. If your home has not yet moved to digital records, or if you adopted a system that does not properly fit your needs, now is the time to address it.
ESRE builds care home systems for a one-off cost. No monthly subscription. No per-resident fees. No price increases. You pay once, you own the system, and you run it on your own infrastructure.
The exact cost depends on the scope of what you need. A focused system covering care plans and medication management for a single home sits at the lower end. A comprehensive platform with staffing, procurement, analytics, family portal, and multi-site management sits higher.
| System Scope | Typical One-Off Cost | Equivalent Subscription Cost Over 5 Years |
|---|---|---|
| Core system: care plans, eMAR, daily notes, CQC reporting | £8,000 to £15,000 | £12,000 to £30,000+ |
| Full system: above plus staffing, family portal, analytics, document generation | £15,000 to £30,000 | £30,000 to £60,000+ |
| Multi-site: full system deployed across 3 to 10 locations with central oversight | £25,000 to £60,000 | £60,000 to £150,000+ |
The maths is straightforward. Within two to three years, a bespoke system costs less than the subscription alternative. After that, every month is savings. And you own the system outright. If ESRE disappeared tomorrow, your software would keep running.
Every system we build, the client owns all the code. There is no vendor lock-in. No proprietary platform you depend on. No API that gets deprecated when the vendor decides to change direction.
We also train you and your team to evolve the system using AI. Since December 2025, AI tools have reached the maturity to work reliably alongside people for maintaining and extending software. We set up your AI to understand your specific codebase, with failsafe environments, version control, and automated backups, so you can make changes yourself with confidence.
We built a complete business management system for Crownhill Gardens, covering stock, orders, customers, deliveries, documents, and procurement. The same approach applies to care homes: a single, connected system where a resident's care plan links to their medication record, their family contacts, their staffing needs, and their CQC compliance evidence. Everything in one place, built exactly for how your home works.
A core care home system typically takes four to eight weeks from first conversation to live deployment. More complex systems with multiple modules and data migration from existing platforms take eight to twelve weeks.
Yes. We regularly import data from spreadsheets, legacy systems, and existing care management platforms. The goal is always a clean transition with no data loss.
We are always available for support, changes, and enhancements. But because you own the code and we train your AI to understand it, you are not dependent on us for day-to-day changes. That is the point.
Either. We can host it on our secure UK-based servers, deploy it on your own infrastructure, or set up a hybrid approach. Your data stays exactly where you want it.
CQC compliance is built into the daily workflow, not bolted on as a separate reporting module. Every note your staff writes, every medication they administer, every incident they record generates the audit trail that inspectors look for. When CQC arrives, the evidence is already there.