Electronic call monitoring, often shortened to ECM, is the digital record of a home care visit. The carer registers arrival and departure. The office, and often the council that commissioned the care, can see whether the visit took place, how long it lasted, and whether that lines up with what was purchased.
It is not the care plan, and it is not the medication chart. It is the evidence that someone was there to follow them. If you are choosing domiciliary care software, ask about ECM before you ask about dashboards. A council framework can make it a condition of getting paid.
What commissioners actually say it is for
There is no single national ECM product that every English council must use. Individual authorities buy or mandate systems, and they publish the reason in procurement notices.
The London Borough of Newham's contract notice for an electronic call monitoring system for domiciliary care says providers on its Independent Living and Support Services framework must use the council's ECM system. Newham describes it as the way the council logs calls in people's homes and in the community, reviews provider performance, matches commissioned hours to actual hours, and generates invoices.
Lambeth's notice for electronic call monitoring says the service should let the council monitor when care is delivered and whether it is in line with the person's care and support plan, and keep the cost in line with actual hours rather than the hours that were commissioned.
Read your own contract. Another borough may want a feed from your system into theirs, a login for a contract manager, or the use of their device only. The commissioner portal on homecareOS is built for sharing visit and quality information with councils without a monthly spreadsheet. Whether your council will accept it is a question for the contract, not for a software brochure.
The regulation that does apply
CQC's Regulation 17 guidance does not use the phrase "electronic call monitoring". The regulation still governs the record. Regulation 17(2)(c) of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 says the registered person must maintain securely an accurate, complete and contemporaneous record of each person using the service, including the care and treatment provided and the decisions taken about that care.
CQC's guidance on that paragraph says records should be complete, legible, indelible, accurate and up to date, with no undue delay in adding information. A clock-in that can be quietly edited on Friday afternoon, so that a late call looks as if it happened on time, fails that test even if the software is branded as ECM.
The care the visit was meant to deliver sits in the plan. Care planning software is the other half of the same record: what was agreed, and what was then done.
What a useful visit record contains
A coordinator, a contracts officer and an inspector are usually asking the same few questions.
- Who was scheduled, and who actually attended?
- What time did they arrive and leave, and was that within the window the person was promised?
- How was arrival established: a tag in the home, a code on the wall, a GPS reading, or an entry typed by the office later?
- If the visit was late, short, missed or delivered by a different carer, is the reason on the record?
- Can the original entry still be read after a correction?
Skills for Care's 2025/26 summary of domiciliary care services reports an estimated 52,000 vacant posts in CQC non-residential services in 2025/26, against 580,000 filled posts, and a vacancy rate of 9.0%. Cover will fail some days. The record still has to show what happened, including the visit that did not.
Ways of registering the visit
Suppliers offer different methods. The differences that matter are whether the method can be used in a house with no signal, and whether the record states which method was used.
On homecareOS, the carer app lets an agency allow any of four: GPS at the door, an NFC tag in the home, a printed QR code, or a manual entry made by the office when something has genuinely gone wrong. Each GPS, NFC and QR clock-in and clock-out is checked against the registered address. Beyond 150 metres the record is flagged for a coordinator. It is not blocked, because a tower block or a thick wall would otherwise stop an honest carer recording the visit. A manual office entry is stored as a manual entry. That behaviour is described on the feature page. It is our product, not a regulatory minimum.
Whatever you buy, ask for a visit that was clocked manually to be visibly different from one that was clocked at the door. Ask what is stored when the phone has no signal, and when that stored visit reaches the office. Ask who can edit the time afterwards, and whether the first time remains readable.
Location, consent and the lawful basis
A clock-in can be personal data about the carer and about the person receiving care. Location makes that sharper.
CQC's page on consent to use technology as part of someone's care draws a distinction that gets missed. Consent to care or treatment is not the same thing as a lawful basis for handling personal information. Under UK GDPR, consent is one lawful basis, and where you rely on it the person must opt in. CQC says to get legal advice before you use technology to monitor someone without their explicit consent.
This article is not that advice. It is a prompt to write down, before you switch the feature on, what you collect, why, how long you keep it, who at the council sees it, and what you tell carers and the people they visit. Your privacy notice has to match what the app actually does.
Questions to take to a supplier
- Which clock-in methods can we switch off? A method you cannot disable will be used in homes where it does not fit.
- What is stored offline, and what does the carer see when the signal has gone?
- Can the council have a login or a data feed, and is that included in the price?
- Can anyone change a clock time, and is the original kept?
- How are missed and late visits counted, and can we export that count for a contract review?
The price of the system is a separate question. Public list prices, where suppliers publish them, are in the comparison of ten UK systems.
Sources
- Newham electronic call monitoring notice, Contracts Finder.
- Lambeth electronic call monitoring notice, Contracts Finder.
- Regulation 17 and CQC's guidance on Regulation 17.
- Consent to use technology as part of someone's care, Care Quality Commission.
- Domiciliary care services in the adult social care sector 2025/26, Skills for Care.
- homecareOS carer app, for the four clock-in methods and the 150 metre check. That page describes our product.