Simplifying Technology in Social Care

The Department of Health and Social Care's 2025 Adult Social Care Provider Technology Survey, published in March 2026, surveyed 1,085 CQC-registered providers and found that 27% were still not using any care technologies to deliver care and support. Among micro providers, those supporting ten people or fewer, that figure rises to 40%.

Cost is the most cited barrier, as set-up costs and licensing fees were selected by 73% and 70% of respondents respectively as obstacles to adoption. Staff training costs and high staff turnover were flagged by 52% of providers, also staff reluctance to use technology was identified by 34%.

That last figure deserves attention. Reluctance is not the same as inability. It often signals something more specific that the technology, as presented, does not feel useful in the moment it is needed.

When a care worker sits down at the end of a shift, or picks up a tablet mid-visit, they are not looking for a comprehensive data management platform. They, however, need to record what happened and flag what matters. When software presents them with dashboards built for commissioners, reporting fields designed for regulators, and data entry screens that require navigating multiple layers, the tool stops feeling like support and starts feeling like an obstacle.

The NHS England and DHSC Digitising Social Care (DiSC) programme say the core benefits of digital social care records is that they free staff from administrative burden, giving them more time to spend with the people they support. Benefits analysis from the programme found that significant time savings have been seen across handover preparation, onboarding, care plan reviews and auditing, with some case studies suggesting savings of 20 minutes or more per task.

Those savings depend on software that is designed around the worker's workflow, not around the maximum possible data capture. When the opposite is true - when a system shows everything to everyone - the time savings disappear, and so does the case for adoption.

Showing care workers more information than they need does not necessarily make them better informed, but can also make it harder to identify what is important. This is sometimes called data blindness, and it is the point at which the volume of information on screen becomes a barrier to action rather than a prompt for it.

In a care setting, the consequences are practical, as a care worker reviewing an individual’s record should be able to see, quickly, what has changed since the last visit, what actions are outstanding, and what the person's current priorities are. If that information is buried within a broader record containing every data point the organisation has ever collected, the risk is that they use it without truly reading it.

The DHSC's What Good Looks Like (WGLL) framework, published in May 2023, sets out seven indicators for digital working in adult social care. One of its core principles is that digital tools should support person-centred care, meaning the technology should serve the individual's care needs. That principle applies equally to how information is presented to frontline staff.

What Providers Actually Need to See

The question of what to show and what to withhold is a design question.

A manager running a care home needs a different view from a care worker completing a morning round. A commissioner reviewing outcomes across a local authority needs a different view again. Software that presents the same interface to all three is not serving any of them well.

The Adult Social Care Digital Skills Framework, developed in line with the WGLL guidance, identifies the ability to weigh up the benefits and drawbacks of technology, and to balance the advantages of digital tools with the needs of the people being supported, as a key skill in digital leadership. That same principle should apply to the suppliers building the tools. Designing for simplicity at the point of use is not a reduction in capability is a deliberate choice about where capability is most needed.

Larger providers - those supporting 200 or more people - are more likely to use technology across all categories. One reason for this is that larger organisations have dedicated digital leads, training capacity, and the resource to configure systems to their workflows. Smaller providers, particularly micro providers, do not. For them, software that requires configuration to become usable is software that will not be used.

The gap between large and small providers in technology adoption is not primarily a skills gap. The NHSX Adult Social Care Technology and Digital Skills Review found that barriers among the workforce included variation in familiarity with digital technology and a perceived lack of need for it. When staff do not see the relevance of a tool to their daily work, they do not use it, and when a tool presents information in a way that does not match how care decisions are actually made, it reinforces that perception.

The government's investment in digital leadership, including the new Level 5 Digital Leadership qualification and the Adult Social Care Learning and Development Support Scheme, backed by up to £12 million in 2025 to 2026, addresses the skills side of the equation. But skills alone will not close the adoption gap if the tools themselves are not designed to be used by people working under time pressure, in complex environments, with varying levels of digital confidence.

The Digitising Social Care programme has supported providers in everything from accessing funding and choosing suppliers to using a single set of standard data definitions. That standardisation matters. But standardisation of data is different from standardisation of display. The same underlying record can be surfaced in different ways depending on who is looking at it and why.

Digital social care records provide a platform for sharing information such as discharge notes, changes in medications and reporting to regulators. They also make the lives of care staff easier by reducing the time spent recording and recovering information. Both of those things are true, but they require different design decisions. The record that supports a regulatory submission and the record that supports a care worker at 7am are not the same interface.

Digital tools, used well, improve the quality and safety of care. They reduce errors, support continuity, and free up time for the work that matters. But the path to that ambition runs through software that shows people what they need to see clearly, quickly, and in the context of the work they are doing. Complexity, for many providers, it is the reason they have not yet started.