Technology is already an ordinary part of adult social care.

Digital care records, electronic medicines systems, rostering platforms, sensors, monitoring equipment and other technologies increasingly sit alongside the people and processes through which care is delivered.

The government’s latest adult social care provider technology survey gives some indication of how varied that landscape has become. Of the 1,085 respondents, 27% reported using no care technologies to deliver care and support, while sensor-based monitoring was the most commonly reported care technology at 43%. Digital social care records and digital rostering were among the most commonly used technologies for day-to-day business management. Adoption of digital social care records among registered providers was reported separately as reaching 80% by July 2025.

Those figures need context. The survey was voluntary, and respondents could not always be distinguished between an individual provider location and a wider provider organisation. The government itself cautions against using the survey to make assumptions about the whole sector.

What it does show is that care technology is no longer a marginal subject.

But how much technology an organisation has bought tells us very little about how well that technology has actually been adopted.

The procurement decision is only the beginning

A technology project can look reassuringly linear.

There is a problem.

A product is identified.

A supplier demonstrates it.

A contract is signed.

The system is configured.

Staff are trained.

The technology goes live.

At that point, implementation can appear complete.

In reality, this may be the point at which the most useful organisational learning begins.

How does the technology change what staff actually do?

What information is now recorded differently?

Has something that used to be checked by a person become automated?

Are staff entering information twice because systems do not communicate?

Does an alert help somebody to act, or does it add another notification to an already busy shift?

What happens during poor connectivity, staff shortages or an unusually demanding day?

And several months later, is the technology still solving the problem it was bought to solve?

These are not arguments against technology.

They are the questions that turn technology procurement into organisational leadership.

Start with the problem, not the product

The first useful question is deceptively simple:

What problem are we trying to solve?

That can become surprisingly blurred once organisations start looking at products.

A system may promise to:

Some of those benefits may be entirely achievable.

But they are different problems and need different evidence.

If the reason for introducing a new record system is that staff spend too much time documenting care, eventually someone needs to ask whether documentation time actually changed.

If the problem is missing information at handover, the question is whether important information is now more reliably available to the people who need it.

If the technology was intended to improve provider-level oversight, leaders need to know whether it gives them better insight rather than simply more data.

Keeping hold of the original problem matters because it gives the organisation something against which to judge the result.

Installation is not an outcome.

Technology changes the work around it

New technology rarely sits beside the existing service without changing anything else.

A digital care record may alter how staff document care, how managers review records and how information is shared.

Monitoring equipment may change how staff prioritise responses.

Electronic medicines systems can change routines, checks and escalation.

A rostering platform may change who sees staffing gaps and when.

None of that is necessarily problematic.

But it means that evaluating the product specification alone is not enough.

Leaders also need to understand the work around the product.

That means asking staff after the initial implementation period:

The answers may be reassuring.

They may also reveal something that nobody anticipated during procurement.

Workarounds are information

A workaround is often treated simply as evidence that somebody is not following the intended process.

Sometimes that is true.

But workarounds can also tell leaders something important about the system.

Perhaps the formal process takes too long at a particular point in the day.

Perhaps information has to be copied between systems.

Perhaps the device is not available where the work happens.

Perhaps the technology expects a sequence of work that does not match how care can safely be delivered in practice.

The existence of a workaround does not automatically prove that the designed process is wrong.

Nor should it simply be normalised.

It is a reason to become curious.

Why are people having to adapt?

That question is particularly useful in smaller organisations because senior leaders may be close enough to frontline work to understand the answer quickly.

The value lies in creating a way for those observations to travel through the organisation rather than remaining informal knowledge among the staff who have found a way to cope.

Understand what the supplier is assuming

Every technology comes with assumptions.

Some are obvious.

It may require reliable Wi-Fi, compatible devices or integration with another system.

Others are less visible.

The product may assume:

The supplier can explain what a product is designed to do.

The provider has a different question to answer:

What happens when that product meets our own people, workforce, routines and existing systems?

Supplier assurance is useful.

It cannot answer that local question on its own.

Ask how you will know when something is not working

Technology failure is obvious when a system goes offline.

Other problems can be quieter.

A system can be technically available and still create difficulty.

Staff may duplicate work.

Alerts may become so frequent that important ones are harder to distinguish.

Information may be recorded correctly but not seen by the right person.

A dashboard may provide reassurance without important context.

People may each assume that somebody else is checking an output.

A process that worked during training may become cumbersome during a busy shift.

In each example, the software itself might be functioning exactly as designed.

The problem lies in how the technology interacts with the organisation around it.

Providers therefore need ways to hear about:

The last of those matters.

Implementation learning should not become a search for failure.

When technology works particularly well, understanding why can be just as useful as understanding why something went wrong.

The provider survey tells us something useful about assurance

The government’s technology survey asked providers what support would help them overcome barriers to adoption.

Among the responses, 58% selected workforce upskilling, 44% selected assurance that care technology is safe, and 41% selected information to better understand available technologies. Costs were the most commonly reported barriers overall.

Those responses make sense.

Smaller providers cannot reasonably be expected to become technical experts in every product they buy.

But assurance should not be interpreted as somebody elsewhere taking responsibility for the whole implementation.

External assessment, supplier documentation and sector guidance can all help.

Local leaders still need enough understanding to know:

That is not specialist technical knowledge.

It is organisational knowledge.

Do not stop at go-live

One of the easiest mistakes is to put the project down once implementation is complete.

Accounts work.

Training has happened.

The system is live.

The invoice has been paid.

Everyone moves on.

But this is precisely when the organisation starts collecting evidence that could not have existed during procurement.

Real people are now using the technology in real circumstances.

That creates an opportunity to ask:

What have we learned?

What surprised us?

What have staff adapted?

Are people receiving care experiencing anything differently?

Have we solved the original problem?

Has a new problem appeared?

Does anything need to change?

Good governance does not require endless scrutiny of every system.

It requires enough continued attention to know when something important needs noticing.

CQC’s current governance quality statement similarly describes effective governance in terms of clear responsibilities, accountability and acting on good information about risk, performance and outcomes. That regulatory framing is relevant, but the organisational value exists whether or not an inspection is on the horizon.

Smaller providers do not need to imitate large technology programmes

A small provider may not have:

That can create vulnerability.

But there can also be an advantage.

There may be much less distance between the person deciding to buy a system and the people using it.

An owner or Nominated Individual may be able to ask a Registered Manager what has changed and receive a meaningful answer immediately.

The important thing is not to lose that advantage by allowing implementation to become solely the supplier’s project or solely the Registered Manager’s problem.

Provider-level attention still matters.

Not micromanagement.

Attention.

A better measure of digital maturity

It is tempting to measure digital progress by counting the systems an organisation has adopted.

That tells us something.

But perhaps a more useful test is whether the organisation understands the technology it already relies upon.

Can leaders see how it affects everyday work?

Can staff raise concerns?

Can somebody recognise unintended consequences?

Is there clear ownership when an issue needs action?

Does anybody check whether important actions actually happened?

And does the organisation return eventually to the question that started the project:

Did this make things better?

That is not resistance to technology.

It is thoughtful implementation.

How Mandersley can help

Mandersley helps independent care providers understand what is happening across the organisation rather than looking at individual processes in isolation.

When technology changes how a service works, that can mean helping provider leaders connect implementation with the wider organisational picture: how responsibilities have changed, what staff are experiencing, where new risks or workarounds may be emerging, what needs following through and whether the original purpose of the change is being achieved.

Mandersley is not a technology reseller.

The aim is not to add another approval layer.

It is to help providers retain enough visibility to know whether an important change is working as intended.

Sources and further reading

Department of Health and Social Care — Findings from the 2025 adult social care provider technology survey, published 6 March 2026 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/technology-use-in-adult-social-care-2025-survey-results/findings-from-the-2025-adult-social-care-provider-technology-survey

Care Quality Commission — Governance, management and sustainability https://www.cqc.org.uk/guidance-regulation/providers/assessment/single-assessment-framework/well-led/governance-management-sustainability

The DHSC survey was voluntary and has methodological limitations. Its findings should not be treated as representative estimates for the whole adult social care sector. This Insight uses the survey as context for technology adoption, not as evidence that particular technologies improve outcomes.