Compared with a clinical EHR
Independent living software, not a medical record.
Search for group home software and most of what comes back is a clinical EHR. Those are built for licensed facilities with dozens of beds and a care team. A small independent living operator needs something else.
By Joseph Surgeon, founder of Royalty Group Homes, who runs independent living homes in Oceanside.
A clinical EHR is an electronic health record: software that documents the care each person receives. Medicare’s definition is an electronic version of a patient’s medical history, kept by the provider. Independent living software runs the house: the beds, the rent each resident owes, and the partners who refer new residents.
An independent living home provides housing, not care. Residents rent a bed, often in a shared room, and manage their own health. In California, a home that gives 24-hour non-medical care and supervision needs a state license. A sober living home that provides no treatment does not need a DHCS license. So the questions the operator asks every day are about beds and money, not charts.
What is each system built around?
Today
A clinical EHR is built around the patient chart: care plans, medication administration, clinical notes, insurance billing. The bed is a field on the chart.
In Royalty Group Homes
The bed is the unit of everything: revenue, cost, and the lease due on the first. Every bed is earning, being turned, or empty. An empty bed is priced at its monthly rate.
How do you get started?
Today
Book a demo, get a quote, sign a contract, then run an implementation project. Pricing is often per individual served and not published.
In Royalty Group Homes
Sign in with a work email and the workspace exists. One house is free with every feature, no card and no end date. The prices for more houses are on the home page.
What does it cost to run a small house on it?
Today
Software sized for facilities ten times yours, with training and modules you will not use. The cost does not shrink to fit a six-bed house.
In Royalty Group Homes
Priced per organization by house count, never per bed or per resident. Charging more as you fill beds is a strange way to help you fill beds.
Where do rent and referrals live?
Today
An EHR is built to bill payers, not to collect rent from residents. Referral partners and open-bed lists usually live somewhere else.
In Royalty Group Homes
A rent ledger by resident and month, to the cent. Arrears are kept apart from money not yet cleared. Referral partners carry their last contact, and your open beds go on a date-stamped public list.
What does an operator check every morning?
In a six-bed independent living house, the morning questions are short. Which beds are empty? Who owes rent, and how late is it? Who called about a bed?
The bed board answers the first one, with each empty bed priced at its monthly rate. The ledger answers the second. Rent inside the grace window shows as Due, and rent past it shows as Unpaid. The grace window is 10 days unless you set another number.
Inquiries answer the third. Each one lands in a list with its stage, and each new resident is tied to the partner who referred them.
What happens to the money at the edges?
Small houses live at the edges: a mid-month move-in, a bed change, a payment nobody can place. An EHR rarely models any of these, because a payer is billed instead.
Here, a partial month is the monthly rate times the nights covered, divided by the days in the month. A $900 bed with a move-in on October 20 is charged $348.39 for October.
When a resident moves beds, rent already paid follows them to the new bed. Collected for the month does not change, because no new money came in. A wrong entry is fixed with a signed correction, and the original stays on the record.
Who on the team sees what?
An EHR controls access around health records. An operations system controls it around houses and money.
There are five roles: owner, regional manager, house manager, accounting and read only. A bookkeeper in the accounting role can post and correct rent without moving residents between beds. Only the owner can change the subscription.
What should you ask before you buy either?
Ask how the price is set. If it is per resident or per bed, it rises every time you fill a bed. Here it is set by the number of houses.
Ask how long it takes before the first house is running. Here one house goes in over an afternoon, with no contract and no implementation project.
Ask what happens to your records if you stop paying. Here you can read and export everything in every billing state. Nothing is deleted.
When do you need the EHR instead?
Royalty Group Homes is an operations system, not a medical record. It does not chart care, track medications or bill insurance. It is not built to hold health information.
If you run a licensed clinical facility with 50+ beds, you need a clinical system. The same is true if your residents’ care has to be documented. Tell us what you run and we will tell you what to look at.
You can also run both: an EHR for care, and operations software for the beds and rent. The two do different jobs.
Related pages
Sources
- Electronic Health Records, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. What an electronic health record is and what it holds.
- Adult Facility Types Licensed by CDSS, California Department of Social Services. Which homes need a state care license, such as an adult residential facility.
- Licensing and Certification: Sober Living/Transitional Housing, California Department of Health Care Services. Sober living homes that provide no treatment do not need a DHCS license.
- Group Home Technical Advisory (2022), page 33, California Department of Housing and Community Development. Many, if not most, group homes do not require a state license.
Built for operators of 1 to about 10 homes, by one. Free for one house, with no card and no time limit.