Choosing software for small assisted living & memory care
Software built for large senior-living chains tends to be heavy, expensive, and aimed at problems a 30-to-80-resident facility doesn’t have. If you run a small assisted living, memory care, or home and community-based operation, you need a different evaluation lens. Here’s the one I’d use.
Start from the work, not the feature list
Vendors sell features. What you actually run is a daily operation: residents get care, that care gets documented, visits get verified for billing, and families want to know their person is okay. Most small operators are stitching that together across a care-notes tool, a separate EVV system, a billing portal, and a patchwork of phone calls and texts to families.
So the first question isn’t “which platform has the most features” — it’s “how many separate systems will I still be running after I buy this?” Every system you don’t eliminate is a login, a contract, and a place where the same information gets entered twice.
The four things a small facility actually needs
- Care and medication documentation. Clean, timestamped records of care delivered and medications administered (MAR). This is your operational backbone and your survey trail.
- EVV, if you bill Medicaid HCBS. Electronic Visit Verification is federally required for Medicaid personal care and home health. The key is whether it’s captured as part of the visit record or bolted on as a separate app. (We wrote a plain-English EVV guide if you’re new to it.)
- Family communication. Families are anxious and they want updates. A consistent, consented channel for updates beats a director fielding individual phone calls all day.
- Billing that matches the care. When the documentation, the verified visit, and the invoice all reference the same record, claims stop bouncing.
If a platform covers those four from one record, you’ve removed most of the daily friction. If it covers two and you’re buying three more vendors to fill the gaps, you haven’t.
A note on cameras and privacy
Video in an elder-care setting is a sensitive topic, and rightly so. In-room monitoring touches resident dignity, consent, and — because it involves health information — HIPAA. If you’re considering any system with a video component, treat it carefully:
- Resident and family consent comes first, in writing.
- Audio carries stricter rules than video and is commonly off by default.
- Any vendor handling resident health information should sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA).
- Scope matters: family-viewing and incident review are different from building-wide surveillance.
Don’t let a flashy camera demo skip past those questions. The right vendor raises them before you do.
Questions to ask any vendor
- After I implement this, how many separate systems am I still running?
- Is EVV captured inside the visit record, or a separate clock-in app — and is my state supported?
- Are care notes, MAR, EVV, and family updates one source of truth, or four?
- If there’s video, how do you handle consent, audio, access scoping, and a BAA?
- What does onboarding look like for a facility my size — weeks, or months?
How we fit (honestly)
TinyGuard puts care documentation, EVV-ready visit verification, and a consented family-update channel on one on-site system — built for the small-facility case, not the 200-community chain. We’re early and deliberately taking on a small number of elder customers we can onboard closely.
And unlike most of this category, the price is public: software from $199/mo + $8 per resident for small residential care (up to 20 beds), $499/mo + $8 per resident for larger facilities — with live video from $7/camera/mo (30-day retention, the assisted-living standard, is $12/camera). The full tier cards and worked examples are on assistedlivinginabox.co. EVV state-support genuinely is a conversation — certification rolls out by region, so email del@tinyguard.co with your state before you commit. But the pricing isn’t a conversation. A 15-minute demo is there if you want a walkthrough — not a gate you have to pass to learn a number.
Got a survey coming up? Print the Assisted Living Survey Prep Checklist and work straight down it.
The bottom line
For a small assisted living or memory care operator, the winning software isn’t the one with the longest feature list — it’s the one that leaves you running the fewest separate systems. Count the logins you’ll have after you buy. That number is the real product.
— Del Peck Founder, TinyGuard
TinyGuard puts cameras, care logging, billing, and compliance on one on-site box. Book a 15-minute demo or see the pricing.