Care planning software is the tool a home care agency uses to write a person's plan and to keep the notes, risks and, often, the medication record that show the plan being followed. The Department of Health and Social Care describes these systems as digital social care records: software for recording a person's care information, replacing paper. The same guidance says they are sometimes called electronic care plans, care records or care management systems, and that they do not normally include rostering or an electronic medication chart, though some products do both.
That last point is why shortlists get muddled. A brilliant rota product can still leave the care plan in a PDF. A care-record product can still leave you building runs in a spreadsheet. If you need both, say so in the specification. Prices for ten UK systems, and which of them publish a price at all, are in best domiciliary care software UK.
What Regulation 9 requires of the plan
Regulation 9 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 says the care and treatment of a person must be appropriate, meet their needs and reflect their preferences.
The registered person has to do a list of things to comply. They include carrying out an assessment of needs and preferences collaboratively with the relevant person, and designing care with a view to achieving that person's preferences and meeting their needs. Where the person lacks capacity, the Mental Capacity Act 2005 applies. CQC's guidance on Regulation 9 says a clear care or treatment plan, which includes agreed goals, must be developed and made available to all staff and others involved in providing the care. Where it is relevant, the plan should include ways for the person to maintain their independence.
None of that is a software feature list. It is the test you can apply to one. If the plan lives in the office and the carer at the door cannot read the goals, the plan has not been made available to the staff providing the care.
CQC's registration guidance for home care agencies says a person-centred care planning policy and a sample care plan are among the documents inspectors might ask for. They are not in the pack you must send with every application. Have them anyway. Writing the policy in software you have not yet chosen is how agencies end up with a template that does not match the screens.
What Regulation 17 requires of the record
The plan is the agreement. The record is what happened next.
Regulation 17(2)(c) requires a secure, accurate, complete and contemporaneous record for each person, including the care and treatment provided and the decisions taken about it. CQC's guidance says those records should be complete, legible, indelible, accurate and up to date, kept secure, and available to the people who need them to deliver care safely. Decisions, including consent and a change of consent, should be on the record. Paper can meet that standard. So can software. A shared inbox does not, if messages can be deleted and nobody can say what the note said on the day.
Contemporaneous means written at the time, not reconstructed at the end of the week. In domiciliary care the time is the visit. The phone is usually the only practical place to write. If the software will not open in a house with no signal, carers will write on paper and copy it up later, and the record is no longer contemporaneous.
The fact of attendance, separate from the content of the care, is electronic call monitoring. A plan with no visit record cannot show that the planned call took place. A visit record with no plan cannot show that the right care was given.
What to look for when you try a product
Use one real person, with their permission or with details you have invented for the trial and labelled as such. Do not paste a live record into a supplier's demo tenant until you know where it is stored.
- Sections a domiciliary plan actually needs: communication, personal care, medication, mobility, nutrition, skin, risks, and what the person wants to keep doing for themselves.
- Goals with a review date, not a single free-text box called "outcomes".
- Risks that point at the part of the plan they belong to.
- The carer's view of the plan on the phone, including offline.
- A correction that keeps the original wording, who changed it, when, and why.
- A medication entry that cannot be quietly overwritten. Refused, missed and not available are different events. Our guide to eMAR in home care goes through that record in more detail.
- An export of the whole record, in a format you can open without the supplier.
The Department of Health and Social Care says that, when you are making the case for digital records, one benefit reported for this kind of system is time: digital social care records can free up over 20 minutes per care worker per shift by making handovers faster. That figure is theirs, from the guidance published on 29 September 2026. It is not a result measured in homecareOS, and it will not appear on its own if the handover is still a paper sheet photographed at the end of the run.
The assured solutions list, and what it does not decide
NHS England keeps an assured solutions list of digital social care records. The Department of Health and Social Care says every product on it offers the essential features providers need, including care planning, recording, reporting and audit trails, meets national standards for quality and security, helps with CQC's good-governance requirements, and can connect with GP records. Products that stop meeting the standards can be removed. Check the list yourself when you buy.
Being on the list is about the care record. It is not a verdict on rostering, payroll or electronic call monitoring. The same page says a provider that wants to use NHS GP Connect needs an assured solution that integrates with it, 'standards met' on the Data Security and Protection Toolkit, and a signed National Data Sharing Agreement. Those are conditions for GP Connect, not a claim that every care system offers it.
On homecareOS, GP Connect is named on the integrations page as a connector agencies can ask to have built. The page does not describe it as switched on today. If GP Connect is essential to your specification, treat that as an open question and get the answer in writing.
How the record works in homecareOS
Digital care records in homecareOS are written on the carer's phone and tied to the visit. The feature page says a medication record or care note can be corrected only with a written reason, and the original wording, the person who changed it and the time are kept. Risks sit against the matching part of the plan. Goals carry a baseline, a measure and a review date, and progress is recorded at the visit.
That is a description of our product, from that page. It is not a statement that homecareOS is on the NHS assured solutions list. Look the list up. If a supplier tells you they are on it, ask them to show you the entry.
CQC may still ask for the sample plan and the policy. Software does not write those for you. It should make the plan you agreed with the person readable at the next visit, and keep what was written when someone needs to correct a mistake.
Sources
- Digital social care records: choosing and implementing solutions, Department of Health and Social Care, published 29 September 2026.
- Regulation 9 and CQC guidance on Regulation 9.
- Regulation 17 and CQC guidance on Regulation 17.
- Home care (domiciliary care) agencies, Care Quality Commission, on documents that may be requested.
- homecareOS digital care records, for how our product stores plans, notes and medication records.