What does this software actually do?
"Care home management software" is one phrase covering four separate jobs, sold in different combinations by every supplier who uses it. Knowing which of the four you are short of is most of the buying decision, and it is the part nobody sells you.
The four jobs
Almost every product in this category is some bundle of these. Suppliers differ far more in which they cover than in how well they cover any one of them.
- Rostering. Who is working, when, and whether the shift is legal and covered. This is the one that costs a manager their evenings, and the one where an unfilled slot has to be visible before it happens rather than after.
- Care records. Care plans, assessments, risk, daily notes. The question worth asking here is not whether it can write a plan — they all can — but what it writes when the assessment is silent.
- Medication. Usually an eMAR. Highly regulated, and the area where most providers are least willing to change supplier once something works.
- Evidence. Turning the first three into something you can show somebody. Most systems store the records; fewer will tell you which record is missing.
Where HeraIQ sits, plainly
HeraIQ does the fourth job and part of the second. It is not a rostering product, it is not an eMAR, and it does not invoice anybody. If what you are missing is one of those, the honest answer is that you need a different kind of product first — we have written about the ones people compare us with, including where they are the better choice.
What it does do is read the records a service already keeps and answer the questions a manager is already asking, naming the gaps by the regulation they belong to. It does not score you and it does not predict a rating.
The question that separates them
Ask any of these systems something it cannot know. A supplier demo will always show you the answer it has; what tells you about the product is the answer it does not have.
A system that returns a confident empty result — no concerns found, everything green, zero outstanding — when what actually happened is that a query failed or a record was never filed, will eventually let you tell an inspector something untrue in good faith. "We could not check" and "there is nothing to find" must not look the same on a screen. That is a design decision a supplier makes once, and you can test it in ten minutes.
Test it with a question it cannot answer.
Your first month is complimentary, with no card. Ask about a month you have no records for and read what comes back.