Smarter Care Lab Notes, February 2026: Updates from Birdie Analytics, Upgraded Rostering and more

Welcome back to Lab Notes, your monthly update on the latest product developments at Birdie, where our Smarter Care Lab team is working on tonnes of new features and products. This is where we share the innovations, improvements, and ideas that are shaping the future of care technology. Let's get started!

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What's new

‍Administer "as-needed" medication with confidence

Our new PRN Protocol Logs report in Birdie Analytics gives you a clear overview of all "as-needed" medications in one place. See details of the specific protocol, who administered the medication, and the outcome - helping you identify usage patterns and audit specific medications to ensure greater safety and visibility.

Please note: this report does not replace the MAR chart in the Agency Hub, which should continue to be checked regularly.

This feature is available for all partners with Birdie Analytics licenses. Contact us here if you’re interested in gaining access to Birdie Analytics.

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A small change to your SMS alerts

You may have noticed that we have removed URL links from the SMS alerts you receive. The content and safety-critical information in the alerts will remain exactly the same, so you can be confident that you will still be notified in the same way.

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What's in the works: Upgraded Rostering

We’ve been reimagining our rostering solution (what we’re calling ‘Upgraded Rostering’) to create a faster, smarter, and more intuitive experience. By rebuilding our rostering, care management, and finance tools as a single system, changes flow automatically. When a visit is moved, the tasks and medications move with it. When a carer is scheduled, payroll is updated instantly.

This new foundation allows for 70% faster weekly rota planning than our legacy rostering. Flexible multi-week templates handle the heavy lifting, freeing up your team to focus on changes to care.

The first version of Upgraded Rostering is already being used by a small group of partner agencies, and a full rollout is planned for later this year. When it’s your turn, our team will provide hands-on support to ensure a seamless migration for your agency.

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Recently delivered on Upgraded Rostering

We’ve already worked on these features to give you more visibility over your weekly schedules and observations:

• Plan care with the weekly roster view: Plan and manage a full week of care in one interactive screen, making it easier to assign, adjust, or cancel visits by carer.
• A clearer view of carer’s weekly utilisation: See each carer's total allocated hours displayed in the weekly view to assign visits more effectively. We are also currently rolling out the next enhancements to select agencies on Upgraded Rostering – the ability to see a carer's preferred working hours range with new visual indicators to show their weekly utilisation at a glance. Preferred working hours is available for Upgraded Rostering partners with Advanced and Plus packages.
• Create and edit observation notes with ease: Create and edit observation notes directly in the Agency Hub. This makes it easier than ever to correct errors and capture missing details, ensuring your records are always accurate.

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What's next: Planned improvements

To give you more flexibility to handle the daily realities of care coordination, we’re working on these next:

• Weekly roster views by client: Manage a full week of care from a client-centric view to ensure their contracted hours are met.
• Visit overrides: Make one-off visit edits while keeping everything else in sync with the original visit template.
• Edit in-progress task schedules: Respond to changing care needs by editing task schedules after they’ve started, while maintaining previous schedule history.
• Stop active visit schedules: Adapt quickly to care plan changes by stopping active visit schedules and enabling fast template updates.

We’re also working on the first versions of runs and shifts as a high priority. Further improvements to visit confirmation, the visit auditing timeline and reporting are also on the roadmap, and we’ll provide an update on these soon. To follow our progress and submit feedback, you can visit our public roadmap here.

Want to see more? Take a quick product tour of Upgraded Rostering.

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Coming soon: SmartPlans

We are in the early stages of testing SmartPlans, a new AI-powered tool designed to help you turn care assessment conversations into person-centred care plans.

Instead of spending hours typing up notes after a visit, SmartPlans allows you to record your client conversation directly in the Birdie app. The AI then analyses the transcript and generates a first draft of the care assessment for you to review and confirm. By handling the administrative work, SmartPlans frees up your care managers to focus on the human side of the conversation, while ensuring every detail is captured accurately.

We are now preparing for the Beta release, which will involve field testing to ensure the product is safe and ready for a wider launch. Stay tuned for how and when you can get access.

To see how we build AI with safety at the core – and to get a preview of SmartPlans in action – watch our Smarter Care Lab video. And for a deeper dive into our clinical safety processes, check out the latest Under the Microscope video here.

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