Birdie, the smart technology platform for homecare, has launched Upgraded Rostering: a new rostering system that lets a homecare agency build a visit pattern once and have the rolling rota materialise from it, on the same record as the care plan, medications, funding, and the audit trail.
A strong roster is critical to a healthy homecare business: it decides not just who goes where and when, but what care gets invoiced, and when carers get paid. However, homecare providers have historically had to compromise on the type of tool they use, choosing between either a template-driven rostering engine, disconnected from the care record – the pattern gets built once, but every care plan or funding change is re-keyed between two systems, and compliance evidence is assembled after the fact. Or, rostering that’s integrated with care management, but functions as a copy-paste exercise, rebuilt by hand every week, with the drift that comes from copying old rotas forward.
Upgraded Rostering removes that choice, combining two core elements in one:
- The roster shares the care record, so tasks and medications attach to visits automatically, conflicts surface as a visit is created and confirmed visits flow straight to finance
- It’s built on a templating engine, so multi-week and alternating-week templates hold the intended pattern of care and the rota rolls forward, meaning coordinators touch only what genuinely changes
“The roster is the heart of a care business,” said Max Parmentier, CEO and Co-Founder of Birdie. “But for too long care providers have been forced to make a choice between rostering that’s easy, and rostering that’s connected to care records. Upgraded Rostering means they no longer have to make that trade-off.”
Speaking exclusively to CareTech World, Sean Gabriel, Group Product Manager at Birdie, explained what the launch changes: “Birdie has always kept the rota on the same record as care, medications, and finance. That connection isn’t new for us, but it’s still rare in our sector. What’s new is templating against that record: build someone’s care pattern once, and the rolling rota builds itself from it, instead of a coordinator rebuilding it by hand every week. Plenty of systems can template a rota. Very few do it on the same record as the care itself.”
Fifty hours a week, back into care
Harmonize Care, a domiciliary provider in Suffolk, moved to Birdie after its previous software left it without a working roster for three weeks. Templates there broke repeatedly, visits went uncovered, and schedules had to be built week by week.
On Upgraded Rostering, the team has around 50 hours a week back from scheduling and the admin around it. Once a schedule is set, it rolls on continuously, and the on-call manager can see at a glance which visits are in progress and which are done.
The time saved has gone back into the business. “Other things then have become a lot more efficient,” said Lisa Edwards, Operations Manager at Harmonize Care. “So we’re now picking up more care packages.”
Tell it once, and the roster runs the rest
Built from a template, the rota holds the intended pattern of care, supporting the continuity of care: the same carers, at the same times, for the same people, as the default rather than something a coordinator protects by hand every week. Anything that differs from the pattern is a visible, deliberate, logged exception.
“The biggest difference that templating introduces is for care coordinators,” said Gabriel. “Their week stops being about rebuilding a rota that was right last week and starts being about the things that have genuinely changed: a carer off sick, a new care package, a visit that needs to move.”
Because that template sits on the care record, everything downstream reads from it. The carer arrives with the right tasks and medications already attached to the visit. The family can see who’s coming. Confirmed visits flow into pay and charge without being re-entered. And the compliance record assembles itself as the work happens, so the evidence is already there rather than being pulled together in the weeks before an inspection.
Proven before launch
Upgraded Rostering has been in the hands of over 160 selected Birdie partners through a phased rollout and has now delivered more than 3.1 million hours of care and 1.7 million visits. In side-by-side testing against one competitor system, schedule setup was 75% faster, carer assignment 40% faster, and visit and medication setup 40% faster.
Agencies moving across from Birdie’s previous roster see the difference in the weekly routine: rota planning up to 70% faster, around 40% less time updating visit schedules, and around 30% less time creating and updating visit plans.
Laying the foundations for AI scheduling
Asked by CareTech World whether predictive or AI-assisted scheduling is on the roadmap, Gabriel said: “It’s definitely under consideration, but I won’t put a date on it until it’s right.
“AI can only safely touch a rota that has a clear standard to work from. And those standards are often clear in a coordinator’s head, but invisible to AI that works directly from a weekly rota. Because it has to deduce the rules itself, deliberate changes might be treated as mistakes, introducing real risk to your scheduling. Whereas a template gives you the missing governance layer: the intended pattern of care, with every exception logged. So the work we’ve just launched is the foundation that makes AI scheduling safe to do at all.”
He added that any future AI scheduling would follow the approach Birdie already takes in care assessments. “When it comes, expect it to work the way our AI already works in care assessments. SmartPlans suggests the answers, and the assessor reviews and confirms every one before anything is saved. In care, we believe the software should do the admin and people should make the decisions.”
