Introducing SmartPlans: Birdie’s first AI product

A first assessment in homecare is two things.

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The first thing is the visit. You sit with the client, you find out what they need, how they like things done, what worries them. You build some trust.

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The second thing is the write-up. Back at the office, in the car, on the sofa at 9pm. Working from memory, or from handwritten notes, or from whatever you managed to jot down while trying not to look distracted in front of the client. It takes an hour. Sometimes two. Sometimes more.

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In a survey of 150 homecare professionals, 86% said a first assessment takes between one and four or more hours from start to finish. Most of that time isn't the visit.

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Today, that changes.

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What SmartPlans does

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SmartPlans is Birdie's AI-powered care assessment tool. Here's how it works.

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Step 1: You record the client conversation on your phone during the visit.

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Step 2: When you open the assessment in Birdie afterwards, the answers are already there - suggested, cited back to the relevant moment in the conversation, and waiting for your review.

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Step 3: You check each one, confirm what's right, edit what isn't. For the most clinically sensitive questions, there's no AI suggestion at all: SmartPlans shows you what was said and you decide what goes in the care plan.

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The write-up that used to take two hours now takes around thirty minutes.

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Charlie Hazell, Field Care Supervisor at Alina Homecare, was one of the first people to use it: "I literally love it. It took me about 20 minutes to write the care plan, saving me at least an hour, and the care plan details were so well-written. I was so happy with the end result."

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SmartPlans is part of the full Birdie platform, and available to all Birdie customers from today with three free hours included.

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Built in, not bolted on

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There are other AI tools for care documentation. Most of them work the same way: record the conversation, generate a text summary, and leave you to copy-and-paste the relevant parts into your care management system.

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That's a better version of the old workflow...but it's still the old workflow.

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SmartPlans fills the fields. The answers go directly into your Birdie assessment - not into a document you then have to read, interpret, and re-type. The transcript lives permanently on the client's Birdie record, accessible to your whole team, not just the person who did the visit. One relationship, one platform, one place where everything lives.

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This matters more than it might sound. Every time a care assessor has to bridge the gap between an AI tool and a care system = reading a summary, deciding which section maps to which field, typing it across - the AI hasn't finished the job. It's just moved the starting line. For teams doing multiple assessments a week, that's a lot of starting lines that still need crossing.

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SmartPlans doesn't have that gap, because it lives inside Birdie. The AI reads from and writes to the same structured data that the rest of the platform uses. It knows exactly which assessment fields to fill, what the dropdown values are, how each agency's templates are configured. It doesn't have to guess - and that's a consequence of decisions Birdie made nearly ten years ago.

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We've written about the data foundations that make this possible - the single, unified data model that has been the backbone of Birdie since it was founded. At the time, the decision was about giving agencies a coherent system instead of a patchwork of tools. It turns out that the same data structures that make a platform work well for humans also make it ready for AI.

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AI in plain sight

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We've written about our approach to AI in some detail here, but the short version is this: if a client can't understand how AI was used in their care, we shouldn't be using it.

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SmartPlans is designed around that principle.

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Every AI suggestion in SmartPlans is cited back to the specific moment in the conversation it came from. Click any suggested answer and you'll see the relevant quote from the transcript and a link to that moment in the recording. Nothing is hidden, nothing is generated from thin air.

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The assessor reviews and confirms every single answer before it's saved. The AI does the documentation; the care professional does the clinical judgment. Those are different jobs, and SmartPlans keeps them that way.

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For high-risk clinical questions, SmartPlans makes no suggestion at all. It surfaces the relevant part of the transcript and you write the answer. The riskiest questions stay entirely with you.

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Mat Spinks, Director at Carol Spinks homecare in Cornwall, put it well: "SmartPlans elevates person-centred care planning to a whole new level. By presenting the preferences and choices of people who use care services in their own words, it provides carers with a powerful insight into what truly matters to that individual."

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That's what "AI in plain sight" looks like in practice. The care plan quotes the client - not the assessor's memory of the client.

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How we built it

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SmartPlans started - as all Birdie products do - with the clinical safety question, not the feature question. Our Clinical Safety Officer was in the room before the first design was approved. Every risk was logged, assessed, and mitigated before a line of code was written.

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We've written in detail about what responsible AI development in care actually looks like: the SWIFT checks, the Hazard Log, the DCB0129 compliance standard, the Alpha and Beta testing phases with real agencies before anything went near a general release. That piece is here if you want the full picture.

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The weekly build updates from our Kites squad - the team behind SmartPlans - tell the less glamorous version of the same story: dignity language standards built into the AI layer, per-agency voice configuration, British English spelling across transcripts, edge cases and production bugs caught and fixed week by week. You can read those here. Building in plain sight means you get to see the scaffolding, not just the finished building.

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Dr Jo Barlow, Birdie's AI Product Lead, led that work: "With AI, we could have started anywhere - there's no shortage of problems to solve in homecare. But the first assessment is where everything begins. Get that right, and everything downstream is better; get it wrong, and you're correcting it for months. It made it the perfect place to start Birdie's AI journey."

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What comes next

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SmartPlans is the first product from Birdie's dedicated AI team, but it won't be the last.

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Homecare has spent the last decade going digital. The next decade is about going smart - using the data and the workflows that now exist to actually improve decisions, not just record them. That requires AI that care professionals and care recipients alike can genuinely trust. SmartPlans is just the beginning.

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We're not working from the same starting point as everyone else. Nearly ten years ago, Birdie was built on a single, unified data model - care, scheduling, finance, assessments, all on the same foundation. That's the reason we can build AI features in months rather than years, and it compounds. Every product we ship makes the next one faster.

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Work done building SmartPlans - the transcript processing, the clinical safety architecture, the evaluation tools we built to measure AI quality - feeds into everything we build next. Each new product starts further along than the last one did. The best AI isn't built by the teams with the best algorithms. It's built by the teams with the best data, and the longest head start on getting it right.

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You can follow what we're building - and why - at Birdie's Smarter Care Lab.

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Try SmartPlans today

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All Birdie customers get three free hours of recording to start - enough for two to three full assessments. After that, SmartPlans is available pay-as-you-go at £3.50 per recorded hour, or on a monthly committed tier from £3.00/hr.

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Existing Birdie customers can head here to start their free trial. If you're not yet a Birdie customer, request a demo to see how SmartPlans can work for you as part of our smart homecare technology platform.

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SmartPlans is part of the Birdie platform and is not available as a standalone product.

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