How Zenoti assists with CQC Compliance (UK)
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) regulates health and social care providers in UK against five key questions: Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive, and Well-led.
Zenoti gives your clinic the tools to securely manage records, engage patients, and provide the evidence inspectors want to see. With everything digital, centralized, and easy to access, you’re inspection-ready at all times.
Safe: Preventing harm and protecting data
Medical Records tab
Zenoti brings all patient information into one central location — the Medical Records tab. This includes allergies, medications, medical history, social history, vitals, and past treatments. By consolidating this data, providers have the full context at hand, reducing clinical risk and helping staff make safer decisions.
Standardized coding with ICD/SNOMED
Zenoti supports ICD and SNOMED datasets, ensuring that medical documentation is consistent and follows international coding standards. This makes records easier to understand across teams and demonstrates that your clinic is aligned with best practices in healthcare documentation.
Batch and lot management
Product safety is critical for compliance. Zenoti allows you to record and track batch numbers and expiry dates for all consumables and products used in treatments (e.g., injectables, medications, skincare).
If a product recall occurs, you can instantly generate a report to identify which patients were treated with the affected batch.
During inspections, you can demonstrate that every product used in a procedure is logged, traceable, and safe.
This capability ensures not only compliance but also builds patient trust, as they know your clinic has full accountability for product safety. CQC expects clinics to show they can prevent avoidable harm — batch and lot tracking is a clear way to prove this.
Informed consent with flexibility and kiosk support
Zenoti allows consents to be captured digitally: before the visit (via email), at check-in (via kiosk), or during the consultation. Providers can walk patients through the risks, pre-care steps, and after-care instructions before asking for a signature. You can set consent policies to be single-visit only or valid for a certain time period, reducing repetitive paperwork while still maintaining compliance. The kiosk ensures nothing is missed — patients can’t check in until all required consents are completed.
Tamper-proof audit trails
Every interaction with medical records is logged, including the user, time, IP address, old and new field values. This means inspectors can see exactly who made a change, when, and why. Zenoti also supports exporting audit logs for a specific treatment form or visit, making it simple to provide evidence during an inspection.
PIN lock and role-based permissions
Zenoti ensures patient data stays protected. Access to records is controlled through role-based permissions, meaning staff only see what they are authorised to. PIN locks on mobile devices and kiosks prevent staff from accidentally opening another patient’s record, maintaining confidentiality and security in high-traffic areas.
Platform security and privacy controls
Zenoti enforces strong security controls:
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) for login.
Password policies (complexity requirements, blocking common/breached passwords, preventing reuse).
Account lockouts after repeated failed login attempts.
Automatic logout for inactive sessions (configurable at 5, 10, 15, or 20 minutes).
Device restrictions to limit access from non-approved devices. These settings help your clinic demonstrate compliance with CQC’s data protection and safety expectations
Prescriptions (where applicable)
Zenoti supports prescription workflows with prescription sets, allowing providers to quickly add pre-configured groups of medications. Only authorized prescribers can sign prescriptions, and reports clearly show which prescriptions were created, assigned, or signed.
For Controlled Drugs (CDs) — which are tightly regulated in the UK — Zenoti can enforce additional privileges, so only clinicians with the right authority can sign. Reports provide visibility into all prescribing activity, which supports compliance with medicines management regulations.
Effective: Delivering consistent and evidence-based care
Unified medical journey
Each patient has one centralized profile capturing their entire journey — from intake responses and treatment notes to photos, memberships, and packages. This ensures providers make decisions with full visibility, reducing clinical risk and improving continuity of care.
Treatment records and annotations
Zenoti supports customizable treatment templates with notes, diagrams, and annotations. This allows providers to document treatments consistently according to clinic protocols, making records easy to review during inspections.
Photo Manager and file uploads
With guided templates, providers can capture before-and-after photos in a consistent format, helping track clinical outcomes. External files such as lab results can be uploaded and tagged for easy retrieval. This level of detail reassures inspectors that treatments are documented thoroughly and outcomes are monitored.
Traceability and RCA
Every change is linked to a specific user. If an error occurs, you can conduct a root-cause analysis (RCA) using Zenoti’s audit trails. Demonstrating this to inspectors shows your clinic has the processes in place to learn from mistakes and continuously improve.
Caring: Respecting patient dignity and providing clear information
Respectful, informed consent
Patients are given time and space to ask questions before signing a digital consent. By embedding the discussion of risks and aftercare into the workflow, Zenoti ensures patient dignity and autonomy are respected.
Pre- and post-care instructions
Send tailored instructions by email, SMS, or portal access. This empowers patients with the knowledge they need, before and after treatments, and demonstrates your clinic’s commitment to patient well-being.
Feedback capture
Patients can leave reviews and ratings after appointments, which are stored alongside their record. This feedback loop shows CQC inspectors that your clinic values patient voices and takes their concerns seriously.
Responsive: Meeting patient needs quickly and effectively
Flexible booking options
Patients can book in the way that suits them best — at the front desk, through online booking, or via the mobile app. Offering multiple channels shows inclusivity and responsiveness.
Transparent communication logs
Zenoti tracks all outbound communications (SMS, email, WhatsApp) in the Notifications tab of the guest profile, complete with timestamps. This means you can show inspectors a full history of how you keep patients informed.
Two-way messaging (eZ Connect)
With eZ Connect, patients can text your clinic for queries, cancellations, or reschedules. Staff replies are logged, providing a documented trail that demonstrates responsiveness to patient needs.
Context at a glance
Staff can instantly view notes, appointments, package balances, and preferences from the guest profile. This ensures patients don’t need to repeat themselves and inspectors see seamless coordination of care.
Well-led: Strong governance, oversight, and continuous improvement
This is often where inspections focus — CQC wants evidence that the clinic is well-governed, accountable, and continuously improving. Zenoti equips leadership with the tools to demonstrate this.
Full auditability
Every interaction in Zenoti is logged. Managers can export audit trails for treatment forms, prescriptions, and consents, showing exactly who did what, when, and from where. This creates a culture of accountability and transparency that inspectors look for.
Manager insights
Zenoti provides a suite of operational reports:
Appointment volumes and cancellations
New patient registrations
Staff productivity and attendance
Package and membership usage
These give leaders visibility into performance and resources, demonstrating active oversight.
Feedback trends
Zenoti consolidates patient feedback into clear trend reports: average ratings by day, month, or service type, plus verbatim comments. Clinics can evidence that they listen to patients, identify concerns, and act — a core part of governance.
Financial transparency
CQC looks for sustainable leadership. Zenoti supports this with financial reports on sales, collections, and accounting summaries. Leaders can show inspectors that the clinic is financially stable and resources are managed responsibly.
Segregation of duties and role-based control
Zenoti’s role-based permissions ensure clinical, administrative, and financial responsibilities are clearly separated. This reduces risk, avoids conflicts of interest, and demonstrates strong leadership and internal governance.
Inspection-ready reporting
Whether it’s an audit log, prescription report, or product batch recall, Zenoti allows clinics to generate and present evidence quickly. This responsiveness shows inspectors that compliance isn’t just a box-ticking exercise — it’s part of everyday operations.
Conclusion
While the CQC compliance rests with your clinic, Zenoti gives you the systems, evidence, and audit trails to prove it.
By securely capturing intake data, managing consents with flexibility, logging every action on medical records, appointments, tracking communications, and producing transparent reports, Zenoti enables clinics to show inspectors that they are:
Safe: protecting patients and their data
Effective: delivering care consistently and accurately
Caring: respecting patient dignity and involvement
Responsive: meeting needs promptly and transparently
Well-led: demonstrating strong leadership, governance, and oversight
With Zenoti, your clinic is inspection-ready — not just compliant on paper, but able to show inspectors that compliance is embedded in your daily operations.
Checklist for CQC Compliance with Zenoti
Patient Safety and Record-Keeping
Keep everything in one place: the Medical Records tab stores medical history, allergies, vitals, and past treatments so staff always work with the full picture.
Record consistently: use ICD/SNOMED coding for diagnoses so your notes follow healthcare standards recognized by inspectors.
Stay compliant on consents: capture digital signatures pre-visit, at kiosk check-in, or in-clinic, with the option to set single-use or longer validity periods.
Track products safely: log every product’s batch number and expiry date so you can prove traceability and manage recalls instantly if needed.
Document treatments clearly: use templates, notes, and diagrams so every action is properly recorded against the patient record.
Strengthen your records: capture before-and-after photos, upload lab results, and tag files for quick retrieval when inspectors ask.
Protect data access: apply role-based permissions and PIN locks to ensure staff only access what they need.
Show robust security: rely on MFA, password rules, lockouts, idle session logouts, and device restrictions to keep patient data safe.
Prove accountability: use Zenoti’s audit trails (who, what, when, where) and export logs for a visit to demonstrate compliance during inspection.
Manage prescriptions safely:
Build prescription sets for faster, error-free workflows.
Restrict signing to authorised prescribers only.
Produce reports of created vs signed prescriptions for oversight.
Apply extra privileges for Controlled Drugs (CDs) in line with UK regulations.
Access to Care and Appointment Flow
Make booking easy: offer appointments via front desk, online booking, or mobile app to give patients more choice.
Provide full context at a glance: the guest profile combines notes, appointments, memberships, packages, and balances in one place.
Capture intake early: use kiosk check-in to ensure consents and forms are completed before a patient is seen.
Respect patient privacy: hide sensitive details like phone or email from staff who don’t need them.
Reduce no-shows: automate confirmation and reminder messages across SMS, email, or WhatsApp.
Communication and Patient Engagement
Keep patients in the loop: automate reminders, reschedules, cancellations, and other updates.
Build trust: send pre-care and after-care instructions by SMS, email, or portal to make sure patients know what to expect.
Stay responsive: use eZConnect to let patients text the clinic directly, with all conversations logged for inspection evidence.
Listen and improve: capture patient feedback after each appointment and act on it to show you value their input.
Leadership, Quality and Governance
Monitor quality: track satisfaction scores, ratings, and comments to prove continuous improvement.
Stay on top of operations: use reports to review appointments, cancellations, no-shows, and new patient numbers.
Lead with visibility: review staff productivity and attendance reports to demonstrate resourcing oversight.
Show financial stewardship: run sales, collections, and accounting reports to prove the clinic is sustainable and well-managed.
Be audit-ready: export consent histories, prescription activity, and audit logs in seconds when inspectors ask.
Demonstrate strong governance: separate responsibilities clearly with role-based duties across clinical, admin, and finance teams.