A home care office runs a diary of its own: the family ringing on a Sunday to ask what care would look like, the care-plan review that comes round every twelve weeks, the carer you are trying to interview before somebody else does, and the induction group on Thursday. Picktime books all four, so the office diary stops living in one person’s head.
Blu CareBook online
Care consultation45 min · care mgrTue, Thu
Home visit · assessment1 hr · North branchTue, Thu
Carer interview30 min · recruiting mgrBook
Next freeMon 10:00Tue 2:00Thu 11:30
Booked online
4:40 PM
On a Sunday, before Monday
Care-plan review
Every 12 weeks
Booked forward on its own
Who care is for
Asked at booking
There on Monday morning
Home health care scheduling software normally means the carer rota, and none of these four are that. Every one of them is currently a phone call somebody has to be free to make, and every one is somebody deciding whether to choose you.
Deciding about care for a parent happens at the weekend, at the kitchen table, with a sibling on speakerphone. Your page shows the times a care manager really has, and they take one there and then.
Good carers apply to four agencies in an evening and go to whichever books them first. Send one link with the interview slot on your recruiting manager’s real diary and the wait stops being three days of email.
A care-plan review is a date somebody promised and nobody diarised. On a paid plan, set it to repeat and every one is generated forward with its own reminder to the family, so the review happens because the diary said so.
Training runs as a session with a limit on seats, and carers book their own place. A full session takes a waiting list on the paid plans, where you also mark who arrived rather than reconstructing it from memory a month later.
Consultations are not interchangeable. A care manager who covers one area, and only does assessments on Tuesdays and Thursdays, is bookable on Tuesdays and Thursdays and not otherwise. A family booking a consultation sees that person’s real availability rather than an office-hours grid nobody honours. If you run more than one branch, each one keeps its own opening hours, its own team and its own booking page, and everything still shows in a single calendar so head office can see all of it without ringing round.
On the paid plans the booking form asks the handful of things you always end up asking anyway, who the care is for, where they live and what has changed, so the answers arrive with the appointment instead of being taken down on a pad. Every consultation, review and visit sits on one record for that family, with the notes anybody has added, so a care manager picking the enquiry up on Monday is not starting the conversation again. Records import from wherever you keep them now and export whenever you want them back.
Twenty to five on a Sunday. A daughter has spent the weekend at her father’s house and has finally said the thing out loud. She looks up three agencies. Two have a phone number and an answerphone. One has a page where she can put Tuesday morning in a diary.
By Monday the decision has hardened around whoever answered it. None of this reaches you as a lost enquiry, because it was never an enquiry, and the same shape repeats all week with carers who applied on Thursday and heard nothing until Tuesday. Picktime makes the office bookable at the hour people are actually deciding.
Care consultation, home assessment, care-plan review, carer interview, induction session, each with the time it takes and the people who do it. Anything the office does not offer never appears.
Induction and mandatory training take a number of seats, and a waiting list when they fill on the paid plans. Say how much notice you need for a consultation and how late somebody may move one.
On the website, in your Google Business profile, in the vacancy advert and at the foot of every email. A daughter at four on a Sunday and a carer at seven on a Thursday meet the same working diary.
Enquiries about care come at the worst hours by definition, because that is when families are together and the problem is in front of them. Picktime’s AI receptionist answers around the clock and takes as many calls at once as arrive, so a Sunday afternoon and a Monday nine o’clock rush are the same to it. It takes the caller through what they need, captures their details and turns the call into a confirmed consultation in your calendar, checked against the same care manager availability the booking page uses. When somebody needs to speak to a person it transfers them, and every call is transcribed into your dashboard, so the conversation you were not there for is still one you can read on Monday.
The free plan is a plan, not a trial. There is no end date and no card, and the price follows how many people and branches you have.
Consultations and interviews land in the Outlook or Google calendar your care managers already have open, and the paid plans sync them both ways, so they move there when they move here. Where a first conversation happens over video, the link is created with the booking through Zoom, Google Meet or Teams on the paid plans, and contacts sync so the enquiry is not retyped.
Picktime runs in a browser on a phone as well as at the office machine, and there are iOS and Android apps, so a care manager out at an assessment can see what is next and take a consultation booking without going back in.
Most agencies run two things. Scheduling software for home health care usually means the first of them: carer visits, timesheets and electronic visit verification, sitting in a rostering system built for that job. The appointments the office itself keeps (consultations with families, assessments, care-plan reviews, carer interviews and training) sit in a booking diary. Picktime is the second one, and it is free to start.
Picktime’s free plan gives a single-branch office its own booking page, appointment types with their own lengths and a record per family, with no card and no end date. Paid plans are about how many care managers and branches you have rather than how many appointments you take.
Yes, and that is the point of it. They see the times a care manager genuinely has and pick one, and it arrives as a confirmed appointment. On the paid plans they also answer whatever your booking form asks (who the care is for, where, what has changed), and those answers come attached to it.
Yes. An interview is an appointment type on the recruiting manager’s diary, and induction is a session with a limit on seats. Carers book their own place, and on the paid plans a full session takes a waiting list and you mark who arrived against the session afterwards.
Yes, on the paid plans. Set the review to repeat and every date is generated forward with its own message before the day, so a review that was promised in March is a date in the diary rather than a note somebody finds in June.
Yes. Each branch keeps its own opening hours, its own care managers and its own booking page, and everything appears in one calendar so head office can see all of it without ringing round.
Onto their record in your account, used to run the appointment, and on the paid plans you decide what the booking form asks for so nothing is collected that you do not need. Rules such as HIPAA turn on what is held, where it is held and what agreement covers it rather than on any one feature. If they apply to your agency, ask us what we hold before you set it up rather than assuming in either direction. Security and trust sets out how data is kept.
Not Picktime, and it is worth being plain about that before you trial anything. Scheduling software for home care visits, with carer rotas, travel between calls and electronic visit verification, is a category of its own and we do not build one. Picktime keeps the office diary that sits beside it: the consultation a family books on a Sunday, the twelve-week review, the carer interview and Thursday’s induction.
Two different questions hide inside that one. If you mean who works which shift and how their hours are counted, that is workforce management, and Picktime is not it. If you mean the appointments those staff are booked into (a family’s consultation, a start-of-care assessment, an interview, Thursday’s induction), that is a booking diary, and this is one. Settle which half you are shopping for before you compare prices, because the two categories are not priced on the same thing.
Picktime is not one and holds no clinical record. What it keeps is the contact behind an appointment and whatever your booking form asked for, which is a different kind of data with different rules attached to it. If you need notes, medication and care documentation, that is an EMR purchase, and the office diary sits alongside it rather than inside it.
Referral intake Referrals that arrive as a phone call, a start-of-care assessment and a video follow-up.
See home health scheduling
Family visits Family visits, assessments and review meetings booked against the people who actually run them.
See aged care scheduling
Matched to a person Clients matched to the counsellor who does the work they need, on that person’s own hours.
See counselling schedulingFree forever for a single-branch office. No card, no trial clock, and a consultation diary families can reach before the weekend.
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