Common Problems with Care Home Software and How to Avoid Them
Have you been thinking about implementing care home software into your care service? But you’ve delayed the transition due to concerns? Fortunately, with the right research and knowledge, there are simple and effective ways to avoid most of the common problems associated with choosing care home software and implementing it.
While new care home management software can drastically improve many areas within your care service, it does come with its challenges. Managers will need to prepare themselves and pay a lot of attention to satisfy all framework conditions and to ensure everyone understands and accepts this new way of life.
Fortunately, our team at The Access Group is here to help you tackle these obstacles. For over 30 years, we have helped thousands of care providers digitise their services. Whether it’s a new start-up or one of the UK’s largest providers, we will be there to help them every step of the way. We’ve put all of our knowledge together to point out the common problems with care home software, so you know exactly what you need to do to avoid them and start using your new system with confidence.
Misaligned Expectations
The software vendor needs to be clear and honest about what they can realistically deliver during the implementation process and communicate how long care home software implementation will take. For example, if you’re looking for a hands-on experience and you don’t receive an attentive level of service, then there could be a clash of information and knowledge. If you thought that the software would be capable of meeting your needs and it turns out that it doesn’t, then issues are likely to unearth further down the line.
There should be strong communication between you and the vendor to ensure your expectations will be met during the implementation process. When required milestones are clearly defined, then meeting expectations will turn out to be a much smoother process.
Lack of System Flexibility and Adaptability
A common issue care homes experience when implementing care home software is that the system implemented is too rigid and can’t be customised or configured to fit their needs. This lack of flexibility and/or adaptability could lead to frustration, not getting the most out of the software and resorting back to paper processes for certain tasks.
An example of a lack of flexibility and adaptability is when the new system doesn’t fit, or cannot be adapted to changing regulatory practices, or the specific ways your business wants to work.
Your local authority or other health and care partners you work with may have certain requirements for how information is recorded.
Or if you are a provider in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland you may find the system, for example, its care plans, forms and other aspects have been set up with English providers in mind, without giving you the flexibility to adapt these to your national standards and frameworks.
During the sales process, you should ensure that you cover how flexible and adaptable the system is. It should be a key part of your selection criteria. Some systems can be easily configured by you, so you should ask the sales rep to demonstrate how to do this. And you should ask them if it’s something that they will charge you to do.
Problems Isolating the Knowledge
Bottlenecking one person who holds all the cards and all of the knowledge of how the system works isn’t recommended. While it’s good to have a system administrator, if they leave, go on holiday or become unavailable for any other reason, it could cause issues, delays and confusion within the care service.
To avoid this problem, you should ensure that a handful of people in the care team have the skills and confidence to use the system efficiently and that there is always someone with this knowledge available to help other members of staff if or when needed.
At the very least you should always have two people per care home who know the ins and outs of the system, how it works and how it has been set up for your care service. This means if one leaves you will instantly have a fallback.
An extra insurance policy is to put much of the information these people have in their heads into some form of documentation, a guide on how the system works, is set up and how to use it. This means you can worry much less about people leaving and being stuck without the knowledge to use your software correctly and effectively. This might seem daunting, but you can start small and build up your ‘guide’ bit by bit.
Poor User Adoption
Users, particularly care workers, can often resist using the system by not ‘buying’ into it or believing that it will actually help them. While others may struggle to use it due to lack of proper training, confidence and/or communication, or just from being unprepared. When new starters join the team and don’t get a good transition of knowledge due to a lack of it in the first place, then they’ll learn poor skills, pick up bad habits and won’t be able to use the system to its full potential (like everyone else).
You can get your care staff enthusiastic about software implementation by keeping them updated about the new change, offering ongoing support, providing consistent high-quality training (e.g. e-learning) and by being a strong leader throughout the process. This will help them buy-in and articulate the benefits for them in their roles, leading to better user adoption.
Continuing Use of Paper Processes
In some cases, people will continue to use some paper processes or specific forms once they implement a new system. This means that you won’t be getting the full use and benefits of the system, and won’t overcome the problems associated with paper-based records. If this situation continues, it also means that you will be reliant upon people to add information from paper records into the system, which is an obvious and risky easy point of failure.
Before implementation, ensure you have mapped out all of your paper processes and how they will be digitised, so you leave no stone unturned and digitise every process and document that can and should be. It’s also crucial that people across the organisation have this information. They need to know where to find it and how to use it, for example, assessment forms within the new system. Documenting and distributing this information, alongside proper training can help you end the use of paper-based records for good.
Inability to Export Data
During implementation, many people struggle to export data from their current system/s to their new one. Once the system is implemented you may need to do occasional exports of data from the system to share with internal/external stakeholders or to upload into other systems.
A common problem you may encounter is that you can only export some data and not other data sets, or learn that data can’t be easily combined from different areas, like client medication data and client care notes for example. Another issue you may experience is difficulty modifying the export setup so that the exported data is in the order or format that you need it to be in. This could be for any of those purposes (for use in other systems, other reporting or sharing with stakeholders).
This could lead to lots of frustrated hours being spent manually reformatting exports, piecing together fragmented data and so on, instead of quickly downloading the data you need in the format you want and getting on with the work you actually want to do.
Using integrated care systems can reduce or eliminate the need to export and import data between multiple systems. You should also explore how accessible data is, and how easy it is to format exports (and if relevant any issues with moving data from your existing systems) during the sales process to help you make the right choice and to make your life easier during implementation and thereafter.
Inadequate Reporting or Analytics
This is when the system you have implemented doesn’t have the reporting necessary to properly understand everything like care quality, incidents, medicine errors, etc. or areas like staffing, training or even invoicing and other business-based processes. In most cases, the problem could be that these reports aren’t built into the system and therefore, not ready to use. The system could lack the ability for you to create or customise reports or there could be a lack of sufficient detail in them.
Or, you can’t ‘drill-down’ data from related modules, or systems can’t be combined to gain a greater understanding. For example, comparing medicines data with data on falls to see if there’s a relationship between the two that you can address to help reduce the number of falls in the future.
This issue is often overlooked during the sales process, but it can quickly be one that people encounter once they start using the system and start trying to generate reports. You should ensure that you properly explore the reporting functionality with the vendor before purchasing a system. Understand during the sales process and before implementation what kind of reports are most important to you. This way, you can properly assess the supplier and the system, to ensure that you don’t get stuck with a system that doesn’t or can’t meet your needs.
Systems from Different Suppliers not Working Together
Using systems from multiple suppliers can work fine, but there are problems associated with this. For example, you will need to make sure you understand which company will provide you with training and technical support with which product. And what happens should one company ‘go under’, be sold or have other overlooked eventualities.
Different vendors may say their system is integrated with systems from another vendor, but it’s important to understand exactly how developed this integration is, how much data passes from one system to the next, how frequently this occurs and how reliable it is.
Ideally, if systems are closely related, for example, a medicines management and a care planning system, then they should be from the same vendor. This ensures that integration is strong and avoids you being ‘bounced’ back and forth between vendors. If you have any problems, you will only have one support team to talk to, and the vendor will of course be aware of any changes in any of the systems that you use.
Lack of Integration
Different systems (sometimes from different vendors) often lack sufficient integration. This can lead to manual data input/export and import, and contradictory data in different systems.
When there is a lack of integration in care home systems, it can increase admin time, costing money as well as hours. In addition, a failing integration can mean crucial information is not passed from one system to another, for example, if a person has taken a medication. This can lead to incorrect decisions being made, or at the least care being delivered without the right information which can reduce resident safety and care quality.
During investigations, it can be harder to gather all the necessary information. This can impact safety, and compliance and undermine your efforts to improve care quality. It also causes issues with care planning processes, data and security and makes the whole thing harder to use.
Not every system you use needs to be integrated with every other system you use. But, if the systems are very closely aligned (e.g. a medication management and a care planning system), then a strong integration is very important. You should ask your prospective vendors how strong their integrations are, what data is shared, what isn’t shared and why. There are many care home software integration benefits to consider, such as an easy-to-use system, improved reporting and better care planning.
A Decline in Productivity
When software is being implemented, there’s a high risk of a decline in productivity within the care home. This could be due to inefficient practices, not enough support or just a general lack of enthusiasm towards the change for a variety of reasons. As a result, this puts the ROI (return on investment) of the new software at risk and can also lead to reduced morale amongst the care team.
To prevent this drop in productivity, you can shorten employees’ time-to-competency and the amount of time it takes for them to finish tasks by using DAPs (digital adoption platforms). This is a type of digital solution that integrates fully with enterprise applications by offering step-by-step instructions and walking people through different parts of applications, so they can learn how to complete specific tasks.
Some care home software has inbuilt DAPs or eLearning to speed up time-to-competency for existing staff and properly induct new staff into the systems you use.
Choose the Right Software and Avoid These Common Problems
Now you should have an overview of what you need when implementing care home software and how to overcome the most common challenges. To summarise, every big change comes with a host of potential benefits and problems. However, when you know what questions to ask, what to look for during your software search and how to prepare, train and support your care team, many of these common problems can be easily avoided. This will lead to a much smoother and stress-free implementation and adoption of using the software in your care service.
Once your care service gets used to using the right tools that are both reliable and efficient, processes within the business will be optimised and simplified, improving your quality of care and employee satisfaction. If you’re looking for an integrated system that can be personalised to meet your needs, then you should consider using Access Care Home Software.
For over 30 years, we have helped many care businesses of all sizes implement the best care home software for them and thrive. Alongside many years of experience, we have a structured and thorough implementation process to guide and support you through the process. This will ensure that your care service gets maximum benefits from using your new software in no time.
To begin your journey to digitisation or simply learn more about our personalised care home systems, book a demo or contact us today.
