We run a care campus. Are you allowed anywhere near resident information?
Yes, with the controls that come with it. We work under a business associate agreement, keep resident data segregated, log who read what, and put a human approval step in front of anything that goes to a family. We also decline work that would be safer left inside your clinical system, and we tell you that at the scoping stage rather than after you have paid for a design.
The courthouse and the county offices are on state systems. Can you work with that?
We build the front edge — the request coming in, the routing, the clock, the audit trail — and leave the system of record alone. Replacing a statutory platform is not something a small firm should offer and not something we do. Where an office genuinely just needs a better intake form and a shared queue, that is a two-week job, not a project.
How does a college in town change what makes sense for a local business?
It gives you a calendar you can plan against, which most small towns do not have. Move-in weekend, family weekend, homecoming and finals are known dates with known traffic, and they land hardest on the block of South Main Street between the courthouse and East College Avenue. If you run a cafe, a hardware counter or a florist on that stretch, building your staffing, stock and opening hours around those dates instead of reacting to them is usually worth more than any clever automation we could sell you.
What does a first project cost, and how do you keep it from growing?
We map the process before writing any code, and the map is what we quote against — fixed price, written scope, and a named list of what is not included. Anything that turns up later goes in a second phase with its own number. Most first builds in a town this size land between four and eight weeks.
If we stop working with you, what happens to everything you built?
You keep it. Resident enquiries, request histories, load records, whatever the system holds is yours and comes out in a plain format on request, with no clause that makes leaving expensive. We put that in the agreement up front because a care home or a county office should never have its own history sitting behind somebody else’s login.
Which parts of this actually need AI?
Reading a delivery ticket, sorting an enquiry by urgency, and drafting a reply are jobs the technology is good at. Deciding whether a resident is admitted, whether a record can be released, or whether a claim is valid are not, and we do not build them that way. Where a plain database and a form would do the job, we use a plain database and a form and charge you less for it.
Do you understand what an inspection actually involves?
Well enough to design for it, which mostly means never deleting anything and always knowing who did what. Every action carries a timestamp and a name, superseded versions are kept rather than overwritten, and you can produce the trail for a date range without ringing us. We are not compliance consultants and we will not pretend to sign anything off.
Are you close enough to be useful?
We are an Illinois team working the corridor between Champaign-Urbana and Peoria, so Eureka is a short drive rather than a flight — in off West Center Street and parked on the square in a couple of hours. It matters mostly because we can sit in the room for the process mapping, which is the part that decides whether the build is any good.