Circle Health Group, the UK’s largest private hospital group, has revolutionised its approach to governance and patient safety through a strategic partnership with Radar Healthcare. The digital transformation spans all 54 hospitals, enabling faster reporting, deeper insight, and strengthening the organisation’s safety culture.
Circle Health Group wanted to move past manual processes and embed more integrated systems to improve the quality of data available to clinical teams centrally and across the organisation’s national network of hospitals.
Simon Geoghegan, head of clinical data reporting and governance systems at Circle Health Group, highlighted: “Previously, we couldn’t triangulate data meaningfully. Now we can overlap incidents with audits and other governance data to get a fuller picture of patient safety across the group.”
The platform from Radar Healthcare brought together key functions including incident reporting, PSIRF workflows, audits, action plans, and real-time analytics, into one integrated system tailored to Circle Health Group’s needs.
On outcomes, the project reported that incident reporting via PSIRG increased by 98 percent, reflecting stronger engagement and more accurate triage processes. This uplift aligns with improved integration of PSIRG into frontline workflows, resulting in more precise categorisation and faster resolution of reported incidents.
There has been an 87 percent drop in PSII investigations, over 12 manual processes eliminated, automation has streamlined meeting preparation, enabling faster, more informed decision-making, and feedback from clinicians has directly supported greater frontline participation, ensuring a stronger focus on safety.
The partnership highlighted how the analytics module in the system played a critical role. Circle Health Group’s teams now have access to live dashboards and real-time analytics, giving them opportunity to spot trends in incidents. Ultimately, this has made teams more proactive, with the ability to mitigate, manage and spot areas of risk faster than ever before, the partnership said.
“The analytics within Radar Healthcare are absolutely amazing,” said Sharon Stewart, director of clinical governance and quality improvement at Circle Health Group. “With Radar Healthcare’s support, we can extract powerful real-time insights that influence the way we build our reports and ultimately shapes our decision making.”
Radar Healthcare also enabled the complete embedding of the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF). The company noted: “The new system allows Circle’s teams to be more proactive, not only responding to incidents faster but giving colleagues meaningful insights to assist service and quality improvements initiatives at every level of the business.”
“Radar Healthcare has transformed how we manage PSIRF,” said Emma Watson, PSIRF lead at Circle Health Group. “We compare investigations live, spot themes, and make changes instantly. It’s real-time learning at its best.”
Overall, the partnership said the platform supports a positive, safe culture by celebrating good practice as well as learning from incidents, empowering staff across all levels to engage meaningfully in governance.
“Radar Healthcare’s ease of use supports our open and transparent culture,” added Sharon Stewart, director of clinical governance and quality improvement at Circle Health Group. “The more we use it, the more we unlock its value.”
Wider trend: digital transformation across health and care
For HTN Now, we welcome a panel of experts to discuss the role of the CNIO in digital transformation. We welcomed Sarah Hanbridge, CCIO at Leeds Teaching Hospitals, Johanna Kelly, CNIO at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells, and Rhian Bulmer, chief partnerships officer at Radar Healthcare. The discussion focused on the role of the CNIO in digital transformation, both now and in the future, considering its importance in driving digital transformation.
In August, HTN shared a feature from Paul Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Radar Healthcare, on why data is the NHS’s most powerful tool for rolling out truly preventative care.
Another of our HTN Now panel discussions, we were joined by Antonia Frost, CNIO at Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust; Jen Tomkinson, assistant director of primary and community care development (urgent response and acute deterioration) at NHS England (SW region); and Roisin Reade, product manager at Civica, to discuss innovation in community healthcare. The session covered how innovation supports a future model of community care, the role of digital and what needs to be the focus in order to modernise services. We also explored what good looks like, looking at short-term goals and how the recent 10 Year Health Plan will shape the future direction.
