The challenge
When a resident joins a UK care home group, staff complete a pre-admission assessment of needs and risks. Those answers fill an interim enabling plan, the resident's first plan of care, which carries an AI summary.
The group wanted that AI admission summary for care homes to carry the one thing a first plan can't afford to miss: the resident's allergies.
Allergies and intolerances sat in a separate tab from the plan. A summary of the first plan is only safe if it includes them, because a missed severe allergy can cause serious harm.
So the work had two parts: a proper allergy record, and a way to bring it into the summary staff read first.
An AI admission summary for care homes: what we built and what we scoped
The group's care platform, built on React, Node.js, Express.js and MongoDB for web and mobile, already turns the needs and risks assessment into the interim enabling plan and a dependency score.
Built in late 2025: the allergies and intolerances record.
Each entry has a type, such as food, medication, environmental, insect or contact.
Staff mark it as an allergy or an intolerance and describe the symptoms and how to manage it.
A tick-box marks a severe, potentially life-threatening reaction.
Every addition or removal is logged with the user, date and time.
Designed and scoped: allergies in the AI summary. We scoped this record to feed the interim enabling plan's AI summary. The AI would read the assessment answers and allergy entries together, so allergies sit beside the care needs they affect. Exactly where allergies appear in the summary was left for the group's clinical team to decide.
How it works day to day
Picture a nurse admitting a new resident. They add each allergy as a structured entry and tick the severe box where a reaction could be life-threatening.
From then on, a banner beside the resident's name on every profile page lists their allergies. Severe reactions appear in red, and the entry itself has a red border. Anyone who later adds or removes an allergy leaves a trail in the log, with their name, the date and the time.
The banner is the source of truth, whatever any summary says. The AI summary is designed to follow the platform's existing rule for AI text in a care plan: it is a draft that a nurse reviews, amends and acknowledges.
The result
Allergies are now recorded with type, symptoms, management and a severe flag, and shown in a banner beside the resident's name wherever staff open their profile. Every change is logged.
Bringing those entries into the interim enabling plan's AI summary has been designed and scoped. Where allergies appear in the summary was still to be agreed with the group. We have no outcome figures, so we don't quote any.
What the research says
Free-text allergies are hard for software to use. A review of 1,751,179 active allergy entries at the US health system Mass General Brigham found 19.6% had no coded reaction, and 43.0% carried a free-text comment (Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 2022). That is why each allergy here is a structured entry, with type, reaction and severity in their own fields.
AI summaries can match expert ones. In a 2024 Nature Medicine study, physicians rated summaries from the best adapted language models as equal to medical experts' summaries in 45% of cases and better in 36% (Van Veen et al.). A first draft of the admission summary is a sensible job to hand to AI.
But they still make mistakes. A 2025 study of AI-written clinical notes, covering 12,999 clinician-annotated sentences, found a 1.47% hallucination rate and a 3.45% omission rate, and 44% of the hallucinations were major (Asgari et al., npj Digital Medicine). So a nurse reviews every summary, and the allergy banner stays the source of truth.
Where AI fits next
None of this is in the platform yet. The AI could read uploaded admission documents, such as hospital discharge summaries, and suggest plan updates for a nurse to approve. It could also check new allergy entries against the plan and flag anything the plan leaves out.
Related reading: How AI Is Changing Care Homes and Clinics: Paperwork First, Care Second
Planning something similar?
Before you let AI summarize a new resident's first plan, ask:
Which record is the source of truth for allergies, and is it visible on every screen?
Where in the summary should allergies appear, and who on your clinical team decides?
Who reviews and acknowledges the summary before it counts?
How are allergy changes logged and attributed?
The allergy record belongs to the platform that runs this group's homes and draws on its admissions and resident records. Full care plans, written later from detailed assessments, are covered in our AI care plan drafts. Read how we approach AI automation, or browse our healthcare software projects.
