The challenge
A UK care home group with several homes takes inquiries two ways: through each home directly, and through a central placement team.
Every inquiry then follows the same path, from personal details and a pre-assessment to pre-admission checks and the tasks that start once the resident arrives. The group needed care home admissions software that kept that whole path in one record.
It also wanted a clear measure of need. Managers had to see each resident's level of dependency, and how dependent the population of each home was overall.
Once a resident has moved in, safety rests on the right information being in front of staff. An allergy buried three screens deep can do serious harm. Resident documents also needed a consistent set of types, so files could be found again.
The care home admissions software we built
In 2024 we built the resident journey as stages on the group's care platform, which runs on React, Node.js, Express.js and MongoDB, on desktop and mobile.
Inquiry. Staff record personal details and a pre-assessment. A later phase added a central inquiries tab, where the placement team can offer one inquiry to several homes and mark one as the primary home.
Pre-admission. Pre-check-in and an assessment of needs and risks, with GP and other professional contacts. The answers fill an interim enabling plan and calculate a dependency evaluation score.
Post-admission. After the home accepts the resident, the manager's post check-in schedules the actions the resident needs, such as uploading a ReSPECT form within two weeks.
We then carried the record through the rest of a stay, with suspension, readmission and discharge each given their own steps.
In late 2025 we added an allergies and intolerances tab. Each entry records the type, whether it is an allergy or an intolerance, the symptoms and how to manage it. A tick-box marks reactions that could be life-threatening. Nurses add entries on desktop and staff read them on mobile.
A document type master list now controls how resident documents are filed, so every home uses the same categories.
How it works day to day
Take a resident who has gone into hospital. Staff suspend the record: charts, forms, menu choices and activities pause, and the room stays reserved. On return, readmission schedules observations, weight checks and a body check within two hours, so those checks sit on someone's list rather than in someone's memory.
Every profile page a nurse opens shows a banner beside the resident's name that lists their allergies and intolerances, with severe ones in red. Each change to an allergy entry is logged. The same allergy and contact data is reused elsewhere on the platform, including in the hospital passport.
When a resident leaves for good, discharge moves the record to a view-only list. It stays there for a retention period set by the reason for discharge.
The result
Homes and the placement team log inquiries in one place, and one record carries a resident from first contact to discharge. Dependency is reported live for each resident, with a chart across each home. Allergies sit beside the resident's name on every profile page, severe ones in red, with a full change history.
Admissions is one module of a larger platform for this group. Clinical charts and AI-drafted care plans are covered in our care planning software case study, staff records in staff compliance and recruitment, and meals and resident money in the menu, activity and resident money apps.
What the research says about care home records
Digital records are now the norm. In the government's 2025 adult social care provider technology survey, 73% of respondents used a digital social care record, a figure that rose to 80% by July 2025. The same survey found 39% saw a lack of staff digital skills as a barrier (DHSC technology survey). Admissions that run as plain stages, inquiry to discharge, keep the new system easy to pick up.
Pop-up warnings get clicked away. A study of 611,192 drug allergy alerts at two Boston hospitals found override rates rose from 83.3% in 2004 to 87.6% in 2013, and repeated alerts were overridden more often than first ones, 89.7% against 77.4% (Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2016). That is one reason allergies sit in a standing banner beside the resident's name, not in a box to dismiss.
Health records are a costly target. IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report put the average healthcare breach at $7.42 million, the highest of any industry (IBM, vendor research). Logging every change to an allergy entry gives the group a trail of who changed what, and when.
Where AI fits next
For now these are proposals, not part of the system. A model could read hospital discharge letters and suggest updates to the enabling plan for a nurse to approve. It could draft a pre-assessment summary from the inquiry notes. New medication records could be checked against allergy entries, so possible conflicts reach a nurse for review.
Planning something similar?
Before you build admissions software for care homes, it pays to settle four questions:
Where do inquiries arrive today, and who decides which home makes the offer?
Which pre-admission answers should feed the care plan and the dependency score?
What should pause, and what should keep running, while a resident is in hospital?
How long must a discharged resident's record stay readable, and does that depend on why they left?
There is more on how we build web applications, on what healthcare software systems do for care providers, and on our healthcare clients.
