Honest comparison
Care Wizard vs an EHR: Two Different Jobs
The short answer
An EHR tracks your CLIENTS — service notes, support plans, medication records (eMAR), visit verification (EVV), Medicaid billing. Care Wizard tracks your BUSINESS — whether every staff member and every home still meets what the Florida APD license requires. What no EHR does is re-read the Florida rules every day and tell you when a requirement itself changed, and which of your staff it touches.
Most Florida APD providers of any size already run an EHR. Those platforms hold the client record — notes, plans, billing — and that is a different job from the one Care Wizard does.
So this is not a page arguing you should replace one. It is a page about which job each product does, because they are not the same job and the overlap is smaller than it looks.
Side by side
| An EHR platform | Care Wizard | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is fundamentally about | The client. Records, service notes, ISPs, incident reports. | The business. Whether the license holds — staff and building. |
| Client records | Yes — the core of the product. | None. We store no resident data at all, by design. |
| Medicaid billing, visit verification, medication records | Yes, and this is usually why you bought it. | No. We never touch a claim. |
| Staff training dates | Usually a module. You configure what to track. | The core, pre-loaded with the Florida APD catalog. |
| Where the requirement list comes from | You enter it. | Already there, each cited to its statute or rule with a last-verified date. |
| Knowing the RULE changed | No. Nothing in this market does this. | The official Florida sources are re-read daily, and a change is reported with a link to the original. |
| Facility records | Varies. Often client-side only. | Fire drills, extinguishers, CEMP, inspections, license renewals, the annual FDLE check. |
| Getting started | An implementation. Contracts, a medical-privacy agreement, configuration, training. | An afternoon. We hold nothing about your clients, so there is no medical-privacy contract and no IT review. |
| Cost | Enterprise pricing, usually per client or per seat. | $25 a month per home, unlimited staff. |
What Care Wizard deliberately does not do
- · Care Wizard holds no client records, no service notes, no medication records and no billing. That is a deliberate boundary, not a roadmap gap — it is what keeps medical-privacy obligations out of the system entirely.
- · Care Wizard covers Florida APD. Outside Florida, or outside APD, the rulebook does not apply and we say so rather than implying coverage we have not verified.
When Care Wizard is
- · You want to be told when the RULE moved, not just when your date arrives. Nothing else in this market does that at all — APD amended 27 rules in one day in March 2026.
- · You want each requirement to arrive with its citation, so you can check it rather than trust whoever typed it in.
- · You want the facility half too — drills, extinguishers, license renewals, the annual FDLE database check that almost nobody does.
- · You are small enough that an EHR implementation is overkill, but large enough that a spreadsheet has stopped working.
Common questions
Do I need Care Wizard if I already use an EHR?
Only for what the EHR does not do. An EHR tracks clients — notes, support plans, medication records, billing. Care Wizard tracks whether your staff and homes still meet Florida APD license requirements, and it watches the rules themselves for changes.
Does Care Wizard replace an EHR?
No. We hold no client records, no service notes and no billing, deliberately. If you need those, you need an EHR — Care Wizard sits alongside one rather than instead of it.
Does any IDD software monitor Florida rule changes?
We are not aware of any. Every platform we surveyed tracks the dates you enter. Care Wizard re-reads the official Florida Administrative Code chapters daily and reports when a requirement itself changes.
Why does Care Wizard not store resident data?
It is a hard product rule. It also means there is nothing about your clients in our system to protect — so no medical-privacy contract to negotiate, no IT review, no procurement cycle — which is why setup takes an afternoon rather than months.
Other comparisons
We compare against approaches rather than named products, because we have not used competitors' software and will not publish claims about it we cannot verify. Nothing here is legal advice.