Introducing GIRBO: a Hungarian system for everyday life in residential care homes
We started from a simple observation: in residential care homes, much of the staff’s time goes not on the residents but on paperwork. We wanted to turn that around.
GIRBO is not general business software that we then somehow stretch to fit a care home. It came about the other way round: from the everyday life of a real care home, with the aim of finally bringing care, medication, finance and documentation together in one place, all connected.
Why not general-purpose software?
There are plenty of good systems on the market for invoicing, project tracking and document management. But that is not what a residential care home runs on. Here, care fees have their own rules, medicines are prescribed by a doctor, the care plan follows legal requirements, and KENYSZI reporting (to Hungary’s national register of social care recipients) requires a set format. Squeezing all this into a general-purpose tool is tiring and leaves plenty of room for mistakes.
GIRBO speaks the language of care homes; users do not have to learn how the software thinks.
Each piece of information, in one place
Most of the frustration comes from having to record the same information several times, in several places: the resident’s details on the care sheet, in Excel, on the payment request. GIRBO’s basic principle is that each piece of information is entered once, and from then on that version applies everywhere, linked to the resident.
- Care entries, vital signs and the resident’s key worker, all on the resident’s profile.
- Medication in one place, from prescription to administration: who prescribed what, and who gave it when, all traceable.
- Care fees and recharged items, in the same place the payment request is made from.
- Care plans, HACCP and other checklists, in a printable form you can show during an inspection.
Built for Hungarian care homes and regulations, with data protection at its core
GIRBO was built for Hungarian care homes and Hungarian regulations: originally for the Hungarian market, with expansion across Europe planned for 2027. The core features work in any country, and GIRBO can connect to each country’s authority systems on request. Everyone works with their own login, and signing in requires the staff member’s phone as well as a password. Everyone sees only what they need for their work, and every change is recorded. We store the data in the European Union; some supplementary services may use providers outside the EU, with contractual safeguards. These are not boxes ticked as an afterthought; they are part of the system’s basic structure.
Nothing to install. GIRBO works on computers, phones and tablets, with an icon you can add to your phone’s home screen. No server in the boiler room, no manual updates: just sign in, and the system is there in the office, at the nurses’ station and on the move.
What we learnt from the first rollout
Introducing GIRBO in the first home confirmed our most important principle: the system should adapt to the process, not the process to the system. Care homes have forms and routines that work and have stood the test of time. A rollout succeeds when it builds on them, not when it overrides them.
That is why introducing GIRBO is not a matter of handing over an installation disc. We go through the home’s processes together, tailor the system to your fee schedule, shift pattern, existing forms and ways of working, and support you every step of the way through the launch.
What’s next?
GIRBO keeps growing. On this blog we will share new features, professional insights and rollout stories. If you would like to see what all this would mean for your home, we will show you in an informal demo.