Plain answers about Care-Meter for care home owners, managers and admins.

Care-Meter is a care-evidence and governance system for adult social care in England. Good care deserves a record that shows it. It’s built for small and mid-sized care homes that are paper-reliant or running partial digital records.

Carers capture notes by photo, voice or typing (depending on plan). The original stays as the record, and a manager reviews before anything counts as evidence. Start where you are.

Pricing is flat per home, not per user. Your bill doesn’t change when staff turn over.

• Starter. Up to 10 residents on digital capture. Where most small homes start. Access is by invitation while we onboard pilot homes.
• READY — £149/month. Digital capture with no resident cap, plus voice notes and unlimited carers.
• GOVERN — £249/month. Digital capture plus governance: adds the governance loop — manager review queue, issues to review, Duty of Candour tracker, audit record, a coverage view of your evidence, mapped to the CQC assessment framework currently in use and versioned as it changes.
• INSPECT — £349/month. All features: adds PIR drafting, mock inspection against the CQC assessment framework currently in use, Regulation 18 notification drafter, evidence export bundles, priority support and dedicated onboarding.
• GROUP — from £199 per home / month. 2–10 homes, with a cross-home view and group dashboards.
• ENTERPRISE — negotiated. 10+ homes, with API access and SSO.

Annual billing saves 2 months on every paid tier.

Book a demo or contact us and we set up your service with you. Starter covers one home and up to 10 residents. Access is by invitation while we onboard pilot homes. It's where most small homes start and many of them stay until they outgrow it.

When you do, we set up paid plans (READY, GOVERN, INSPECT) with you directly. They remove the resident cap and add voice notes, the incident log and the governance and inspection tools. For GROUP and ENTERPRISE, book a demo.

In adult social care, staff turnover is high and admin capacity is low. Per-seat pricing punishes growth and creates friction every time someone joins or leaves. Per-home pricing is simple, predictable, and matches how owners and finance directors actually budget.

As little as we can avoid. Carers can keep writing notes by hand and photograph them at the end of a shift, dictate after handover, or type directly. We deliberately don’t ask staff to learn a new workflow on day one — the system meets them where they already work.

Yes. Every note — typed, photographed, or dictated (depending on plan) — lands in a manager review queue awaiting your review before it counts as evidence. The carer’s note is kept as written.

You see what was captured, the AI’s reading of it, a record quality score, and any clinical or safeguarding risk flags before signing off. Every approval, edit and override is written to the permanent audit record.

On the INSPECT plan you get:

• A live coverage map showing where evidence is strong or thin across all CQC’s five key questions and the CQC assessment framework currently in use (versioned as it changes).
• A PIR drafting assistant that pre-populates the Provider Information Return from your live records.
• A mock inspection mode.
• A Regulation 18 notification drafter (incident notification under the CQC (Registration) Regulations 2009; the provider decides whether and when to notify).
• Key Question-structured evidence export bundles for handing over to inspectors or commissioners.

The point is to see where evidence is strong and where it needs attention before an inspection.

• Regulation 17 — Good Governance (2014 Regulated Activities Regulations). Contemporaneous records, manager review queue, permanent audit record, evidence completeness checks.
• Regulation 18 — Notification of Incidents (CQC (Registration) Regulations 2009; not Regulation 18 “Staffing” of the 2014 Regulations). Flagging of notifiable incidents on the GOVERN tier and above; a Regulation 18 notification drafter on the INSPECT tier.
• Regulation 20 — Duty of Candour (2014 Regulated Activities Regulations). The four Duty of Candour steps recorded against each incident where a manager records that Regulation 20 applies, with who did each step and when. Duty of Candour work that needs attention appears in the Exception Inbox.
• CQC’s five key questions. Live evidence coverage map, mapped to the CQC assessment framework currently in use and versioned as it changes.
• Provider Information Return (PIR). AI drafting assistant on the INSPECT tier.

As of October 2026, CQC assesses adult social care services against the 34 quality statements of its Single Assessment Framework, grouped under five key questions. CQC has said new frameworks will replace quality statements with key lines of enquiry; it has not yet confirmed when they take effect. The five key questions stay. Care-Meter’s mappings are versioned so you can see your evidence against the framework in force.

Care-Meter is a care-evidence and governance system. It is not an NHS-assured digital social care record and has not completed the DSCR assurance process. It holds care notes (photo, voice or typed, depending on plan), care plans, assessments and incidents under manager review, with the carer’s original words kept as the record, and the audit trail behind every entry.

On top of that: issues to review, the Regulation 20 chain, PIR drafting, mock inspection, and Key Question evidence export, depending on your plan. Care-Meter is not an eMAR and does not give, check or block medicines.

Yes — on the INSPECT plan. The PIR drafting assistant reads from your live evidence base and pre-populates a draft of your annual Provider Information Return, so you’re editing rather than starting from scratch.

We follow the current PIR structure as published by CQC; we don’t hard-code outdated formats.

When an incident is logged and classified as notifiable, Care-Meter asks a manager to record whether Duty of Candour (Regulation 20) applies, with a written reason if it does not. Being notifiable to CQC does not by itself mean it applies. Where it applies, the Duty of Candour record holds four steps — verbal notification with apology, written notification with apology, investigation outcome communicated, and investigation closed with preventive action documented — and records who did each step and when. Duty of Candour work that needs attention appears in the Exception Inbox. Regulation 20 requires notification as soon as reasonably practicable.

The audit record timestamps every step so you can show the full Duty of Candour sequence on demand.

All Care-Meter data is hosted on AWS in the UK (London). Access is restricted by organisation and by role. Records belong to your organisation, and people outside it are not given access to them.

Inside your organisation, access is gated by role: Administrator, Manager, Nurse, Senior Carer, Carer, and Family — each sees only what their role permits.

• Storage is encrypted and versioned in AWS S3.
• Every audit record entry is protected against tampering.
• Deployments use short-lived credentials — no long-lived secrets in our pipelines.
• Role-based access control is enforced at the API layer.

Five — and we publish the list.

Resident data does not pass through marketing analytics tools, and we do not license anonymised resident cohorts to research bodies or third parties. The full list lives at /sub-processors and is updated whenever it changes — we mirror it from Schedule 3 of our DPA.

No. Care-Meter is hosted in the UK (London) and calls foundation models on AWS Bedrock. Processing other than Anthropic Claude inference stays in the UK (London); Claude inference is requested from London but may be served from EU regions (DPA Schedule 3). Bedrock is configured so prompts and outputs are not retained for model training, and the underlying models are not fine-tuned on your data.

The specific models in production today, and what each is used for:

• Claude Sonnet 5 (eu.anthropic.claude-sonnet-5, an EU cross-region inference profile) — PIR drafting, and the last fallback in the Copilot.
• Claude 3.7 Sonnet (anthropic.claude-3-7-sonnet-20250219-v1:0) — handwriting OCR and incident analysis with images.
• Claude 3 Haiku (anthropic.claude-3-haiku-20240307-v1:0) — OCR fallback when Sonnet is throttled.
• Amazon Nova Pro (amazon.nova-pro-v1:0) — PIR drafting fallback and incident text analysis.
• Amazon Nova Lite (amazon.nova-lite-v1:0) — Regulation 18 notifiability classification and the Copilot’s note-vision check.
• The Copilot model chains — NVIDIA Nemotron Super (nvidia.nemotron-super-3-120b), Google Gemma 3 (google.gemma-3-27b-it) and Mistral Magistral Small (mistral.magistral-small-2509) lead the chains, depending on the task; Mistral Ministral 3 (mistral.ministral-3-14b-instruct) is a fallback.

Every AI-generated output is held in a manager review queue before it counts as evidence, and every model call records the model identifier and prompt version for auditable provenance.

When a carer submits a note — typed, voice (depending on plan), or photographed handwriting — Care-Meter:

• Extracts the text (AWS Textract for handwriting, Amazon Transcribe for voice).
• Runs the extracted text through Claude on AWS Bedrock to produce a structured summary.
• Classifies it against the CQC assessment framework currently in use — versioned as the framework changes.
• Assigns a record quality score.
• Flags clinical or safeguarding risk indicators.
• Routes the note to the manager review queue for your review.

Every model call is logged with the model identifier and prompt version. The original capture (photo, voice file, or typed text) is preserved so you can re-verify against source.

Nothing becomes evidence without a manager verifying it. The carer’s note is kept as written.

The record quality score is our measure of how reliably the digital record reflects the original capture — particularly important for handwritten photos where OCR confidence varies.

A low score routes a note to closer manual review; a high score still goes through a manager but with a clearer signal that it can be approved quickly. It’s transparency about confidence, not a substitute for human oversight.

Three ways to correct it:

• Carers editing their own draft can correct or dismiss the AI’s suggested classification, summary, or extracted detail before submitting.
• Managers in the review queue can edit, approve, or return the note to the carer with a written reason — for example “Please add the time this occurred and the outcome of the intervention.”
• If a verified note later needs a fix, an additional override is recorded in the permanent audit record.

The original capture (photo, voice file, or typed text) is preserved in every case so you can re-verify against source.

Every action — returned to carer, automatically approved, or overridden after verification — is recorded in the permanent audit record.

Admins manage staff inside the People tab in Settings. From there you can:

• Invite staff by email — invitations carry the assigned role and expire if not accepted.
• Assign roles — Administrator, Manager, Nurse, Senior Carer, Carer, Family. Each role’s access is enforced at the API layer, not just in the UI.
• Edit a person’s role, deactivate them, or remove them when they leave.

All of this is self-service. Carers, nurses and senior carers can be added by an admin without contacting Care-Meter support.

Yes — on GROUP (2–10 homes) and ENTERPRISE (10+) plans.

Admins use the Homes tab in Settings to:

• Add a new care home to the organisation, including its CQC location ID and registered manager.
• Edit home details as registrations change.
• View the home directory across the organisation, with cross-home risk and evidence rolling up to the group dashboard.

Tenant isolation still applies inside the organisation: a home’s records are visible only to staff associated with that home, plus the organisation’s admins.

Note approvals. Admins set the home’s approval policy in the Approvals tab. Default policy is manager review on every note; admins can configure automatic approval thresholds (for example, notes above a record quality threshold from senior carers) within the policy bounds Care-Meter publishes.

Available tools. What features are available is determined by your plan tier (READY, GOVERN, INSPECT, GROUP, ENTERPRISE). Admins upgrade or downgrade their plan from the Billing tab; the change takes effect at the next billing cycle.

Sensitive admin actions — plan changes, role escalation, home creation — are written to the audit record.

No. You start on Care-Meter with new notes from day one and digitise historical records on whatever schedule suits — typically by photographing them as they come up in resident reviews. Your evidence base compounds from the day you start, not the day you finish migrating.

Already on a digital system? Talk to us about an evidence check of your existing records. An assisted backfill service is available, with pricing agreed during pilots.

Why digital-only? We never take physical custody of your residents’ records. That eliminates chain-of-custody risk, courier loss, and any secure-destruction obligation you’d otherwise be transferring to us. You keep your own paper; we work from your scans.

Care-Meter is built by Willmachi Limited (t/a Care-Meter), Co. No. 14540910, ICO registration ZC107807, based in Sittingbourne, Kent.

Support for all paying tiers is at support@care-meter.co.uk. GROUP and ENTERPRISE plans include onboarding support and priority response.