2022 year in review

On average in 2022 we released a fix, improvement, or new feature for CareHQ every other day (and not a single release resulted in downtime).

Number of releases might seem like an odd figure to focus on for a year in review. What about growth? Or, as we're a "care tech" company, we could focus on crucial stats like how much we raised in our latest funding series or the number of cups of coffee our developers consumed. Well, let's cover those points; we grew in 2022, we consumed more tea than coffee, and we remain profitable and self-funded. Phew!

However, for us the biggest achievement of the past year has been the continuous delivery of user requested fixes, improvements and features alongside a growing collection of documentation and video guides to support CareHQ. We don't have investors to impress with growth, we just need to impress you, our users.

Getting regular feedback from users can be hard. Providing feedback takes time out of an already busy day. Instead bugs can often be ingeniously worked around or simply ignored, and suggestions for improvements or new features must compete with other higher priority tasks (such as a well earned cuppa). Unless users believe their feedback will bring about change in the short term, there's no incentive to provide regular feedback.

To solve this we've built our workflow around a simple loop; listen to user feedback, prioritise development around changes that will provide the biggest improvement, and deliver on those changes as soon as possible. We respond to every feedback request, we aim to deliver features in weeks or days and we follow up with users when we release new features. The effect of this loop is that CareHQ continuously improves to meet the needs of our users.

Epic releases in 2022

If you're interested in reading about everything we released for CareHQ in 2022 we provide monthly round-ups. But for the year in review we wanted to highlight some of the more epic releases.

New integrations to save you time

We added integrations for TrustedCare, carehome.co.uk, and Autumna. Enquiries generated through these web directories can now be automatically imported into CareHQ, saving time and reducing data entry errors.

Benchmark against the market

We added market benchmark reports. We use data from TrustedCare Pro to provide reports that benchmark your performance against that of the market based on data from more than 30,000 care enquiries.

Currently you can benchmark how different referrers (such as Google Business or carehome.co.uk) perform and how many leads your homes receive per month against the market average. A report allowing you to compare your conversion rate is planned for 2023.

Keep track of resident care funds

We added care fund tracking for residents, making it simple to keep track of when a resident's funds will be depleted, giving you enough advanced notice to address the issue of future funding.

Ensure your documentation is complete

We added required documents allowing you to define a list of documents (such as proof of funding, direct debit mandate, etc.) that are required for a resident based on their care needs, length of stay, and funding type.

Required documents make it easy to ensure that your resident documentation is complete and up to date.

Discover what an average stay looks like at your care homes

We added the average stay report which provides both average duration and revenue for residents staying in your care homes, as well as distribution charts showing a fuller picture of how that average breaks down.

The report highlights the long tail nature of stays within a care home and the importance of not relying solely on the average when deciding policy, such as how long a resident needs to prove they can fund their care for.

Introducing the import engine

At the end of 2022 we introduced support for importing data into CareHQ from spreadsheets. Currently actions, assessments, care enquiries, change log entries, comments, home visits, and resident contacts can all be imported into CareHQ with support for importing additional data collection planned for 2023.

The motivation behind imports has two parts: to help us transition new clients over from existing CRM applications, and to simplify and speed up the process of bulk updating certain record types such as room rates.

Alongside the import engine we have also been working on tools to help new clients transition from their existing CRM applications. These tools automate the process of extracting data from an existing CRM and converting it into a format that can be imported into CareHQ. If you're considering a move to CareHQ but are concerned about the complexity of moving away from your existing CRM, then do get in touch as we're confident we can help make the process simpler and faster than you might have thought possible.

A look at the year ahead...

Our goals for the next 12 months remain largely the same; we continue to focus on delivering improvements and new features as well as supporting our users through training, video guides, and online help articles.

We expect our user base to double within the first 6 months of 2023. Whilst this pace of growth is very welcome, we also recognise it brings logistical challenges and have taken steps to ensure we have the personnel in place to handle the increase in setup, training, and support tasks.

Epic new features in 2023

There are a number of new features we're especially excited about working on this year, including:

• Support for managing staff rotas. This feature has been requested by a number of clients and whilst it's a substantial development piece, we expect to see an initial release later in 2023.
• The ability to  manage bookings for day care service users. This feature is currently in development with an estimated released date in April 2023.
• A dedicated B2B marketing list. Currently B2B contacts are all managed under the location key contacts list, but feedback from users has flagged that there's often a need to manage contacts for marketing separately from other key contacts such as councils, care professionals, and suppliers.
• More features for the invoicing engine. We estimate our clients will generate invoices in the region of £500m annually through the CareHQ platform by the end of 2023. As more clients rely on CareHQ we're seeing an increase in feature requests to further automate the billing process.

No price increase in 2023

CareHQ is £150 or less (exc. VAT) per care home. View our pricing page for details.

Fin

We want to end by thanking every one of our users for your support and feedback in the last 12 months. It's a little over 2 years since we set up our first care home on CareHQ and since then we've set up over 500. That wouldn't have been possible without the feedback and patience of our early users who threw in with us to build something better.

So thank you. We wish you good health and a prosperous year for 2023.