Building better care businesses through digital transformation

By Fiona Hale, managing director of CoolCare.

While the rise in the cost of living has impacted all sectors and businesses in their own way, there is strong evidence to suggest that within the care sector, digital transformation has strengthened businesses and given them greater resilience to changing times.

Care homes using care home administration software have seen benefits, from increased business performance to major reductions both in the number of administrative tasks and the time taken to complete them.

Occupancy and enquiries

A challenge for many homes is the effective management of enquiries and the stabilising of occupancy and fees – a steady stream of enquiries and an efficient process of handling them are both fundamental to continued business success. Care homes utilising digital enquiry management have reported achieving between 29-62% above the national average for weekly fees, as well as an average of 82% occupancy for those managing resident records using software also.

Furthermore, the reliable and effective enquiry management within care home administration software has allowed care homes to report an average of 20 days to convert an enquiry to an admission, helping to keep empty beds to a minimum.

Fee management and invoicing

On average, care homes make around 15 fee adjustments per month as care needs evolve and funding situations change, with some making over 100 adjustments when needed. As the decision for an older person to go into care is often deeply personal for an individual and their family, invoice accuracy is incredibly important for care homes where fee errors can create distress.

Using care home management software to support invoice processing and generation both reduces the time taken and simplifies the process. A manual fee change takes an estimated 15 minutes on average. Care home administration software brings this down to just a few clicks, saving care homes around 2.5 hours in an average month and much more in months with greater volumes of changes.

People processes

There are also opportunities for time savings across staff processes too. With some 696,000 care home staff in the UK, the number of times staff clockin and out is easily in the millions. Care home management software can automatically add clock-in times to timesheets and ‘snap’ to the appropriate shift time, saving time for staff daily and also for payroll teams at the end of the month.

Meanwhile, the average care home receives an average of 21 holiday requests each month. Where a manual holiday request takes a total of around 15 minutes, a digital process reduces this to an estimated five minutes. By digitalising this process, care homes stand to save around 3.5 hours each month – that’s a full working week each year.

Overall, the data suggests that undergoing digital transformation and adopting care home administration software has the power to make care homes stronger and more resilient as businesses, by reducing costs through automation and improving accuracy. Meanwhile, the same software can benefit care home staff hugely, reducing the workload and easing the weight of the administrative burden in a tightly regulated sector. However, the UK financial situation changes in the coming months – taking steps to improve business processes now will help the care sector to face the challenges head on.

Fiona Hale, is the managing director of CoolCare. Centred on admin made easy, its services are aimed at making operating care homes easier, more efficient and more profitable.

Following three decades of care home administration software development, CoolCare knows what good looks like –and it seeks to help care homes love their admin by making it simple. Its intuitive design drives higher staff confidence and increases the impact of digital adoption, while CoolCare’s user-friendliness is legendary, making it the software of choice for some of the UK’s leading care home operators.