Six questions worth asking
Most software demos are a tour of the things that work. These are the questions that tell you about the rest of it, and two of them are ones we would rather you did not ask us.
1. What does it do when it does not know?
Ask for a report on a period with no records in it. If the answer is a zero, a green tick or "no issues found", you have learned something important: the system cannot tell the difference between a clean month and a failed lookup. On a regulated service that difference is the whole job.
2. Who approves what the AI writes?
If a product drafts care records, ask what stands between the draft and the record. "It's reviewed" is not an answer — ask whether the reviewer is named, whether the approval is recorded, and whether the previous version still exists afterwards.
3. Can you undo it?
Any system that writes to records at scale will one day write the wrong thing to the wrong person. The question is whether that is a support ticket or a button.
4. How do you get your data out?
Ask this before you sign, not when you are leaving. Ask what format, how long it takes, whether it includes the audit trail, and whether it costs anything. A supplier who is comfortable answering that is telling you something about the next five years.
5. What does it refuse to do?
Every product has limits. The useful signal is whether the supplier will name them unprompted. Ours are written down — see what HeraIQ does not do — and a supplier who says their product has no limitations is describing the sales process, not the software.
6. What is it actually replacing?
The most expensive buying mistake in this category is a product that overlaps eighty per cent with something you already run, so you pay for both and your staff use whichever one they were trained on first.
Be specific about the job that is unfilled. If it is rostering or medication, you need an operations platform, and several of the ones people compare us with do that better than we would. If the unfilled job is getting a straight answer out of records you already keep, that is the one we built for.
Put question one to us first.
Your first month is complimentary, with no card. Ask about a month you have no records for — that is the question this page is really about.