There's some noise in the industry debating whether technology is helping or hindering care. Both sides of the debate have a lot to say – I'd like to bring some insight as to where this perception is coming from, and why it might even be earned.
The problem is, many of the legacy and behemoth DSCR systems that exist are letting providers down. Care teams are finding that demos don't hold up once the contract is signed, promised roadmap features stay "18 months out" for two years running, providers ask for a three-month trial and get pushback instead. Plus, these systems only really fit your service once you've bought a customisation package to patch the gaps and then are handed over with no support to actually embed it. Platforms that don't talk to each other, so your team enters the same information three times.
When we take all of this into account, this tech scepticism is not an unfair reading of the market.
Social care has undergone a major digitalisation over the last decade. But for most providers, being digital is little more than recording and they haven’t yet had the opportunity to tap into intelligence and insight because their systems are holding them back. Data goes in every single day: logs, incidents, medication rounds, care plan updates. Very little comes back out in a form anyone can use. Some estimates put genuine value realisation at around 1 in 5 providers. The rest are paying, often a lot, for a filing cabinet with a login screen.
So, when a Registered Manager says they've stopped trusting tech, they've usually got the receipts to back it up.
Where the frustration is actually pointing
A few of the complaints from within this debate are worth pulling apart, because they're not really complaints about technology. They're complaints about how technology gets sold and built.
Heavy customisation isn't a sign of a flexible platform. It's usually a sign the core product doesn't fit your service, and you're now paying to build the bit that should have come as standard. A system built for elderly residential care doesn't become a learning disability platform because you've added enough settings. It becomes a residential platform with LD-shaped scaffolding bolted on.
Long roadmap timelines and demo environments that don't reflect real usage are what happens when the sales conversation and the product conversation are two different teams with two different incentives. You're being sold a vision, not shown a system.
And interoperability failures, the classic "all-in-one" platform where none of the modules actually speak to each other, usually mean you're looking at an acquisition strategy, not an engineering one. Several systems bought and stitched together under one brand, still running as separate products behind the scenes.
None of this is a reason to give up on tech doing better for the sector (because we promise you – it can support the sector), it's a reason to get sharper about what you're evaluating.
What good actually looks like
Providers don't need to take a system's word for any of this. A few things separate a platform built to solve your problem from one built to close a deal:
You should be able to try it properly before you commit to it, not sit through a curated demo and sign on trust. If a vendor won't give you real time in the real product, that tells you something.
Your data should be yours. Portable, exportable, never held hostage by contract terms designed to make leaving harder than staying. And, you should definitely never need to pay to export your data. This is fundamental. Data should stay with providers, and belong to the individual.
Support for embedding the system into daily practice shouldn't be an optional extra you discover you needed three months in. It should be part of what you're buying from day one.
And when a system genuinely fits how your service works, from the ground up rather than through custom-built patches, your staff stop working around it. The right way to record becomes the easy way to record, which is the entire point.
The debate around tech scepticism is right to push back on a decade of tech that overpromised and underdelivered. Social care doesn't need less scepticism about technology. It needs a sharper set of questions to ask before signing anything, and providers willing to hold every vendor, us included, to the standard of proving it rather than promising it.
