In our latest edition of our Interview Series, we had a chat with Paul Johnson, CEO of Radar Healthcare.
Radar Healthcare supports organisations across health and social care to improve governance, risk, compliance and quality outcomes.
With an understanding of operational challenges and by working collaboratively across all areas of healthcare, their software simplifies the regulatory complexities faced by healthcare providers giving them more time to focus on delivering their service.
Can you tell me about yourself and your organisation?
Over the last 25 years I have held a number of roles with a focus on technology, across various sectors. In terms of the company, we’ve been around since 2012 and the idea really came from the co-founder Lee Williams and myself, to develop something to help organisations with operational and regulatory challenges in a smart and effective way. That was the catalyst for developing Radar Healthcare.
Radar Healthcare covers almost every provider type in the sector and is very scalable. So, we have small clients right through to the largest care providers in the UK. We work with care homes, domiciliary supported living, private clinics, private hospitals, NHS Trusts, right up to those large care trusts as well. Our software helps a healthcare provider manage several key functions across incident and event reporting, workforce compliance, audits, business compliance, task management, action plans and risk management. Through this integrated approach and its advanced analytics our customers can instantly monitor quality and compliance by providing full visibility of information across one or multiple services. Radar can be utilised at pace and scale. It fully supports remote working as it can be deployed remotely and it has embedded within it digital adoption tools – the training for using the system is within the system itself so it isn’t an onerous task to implement it within the organisation. No hardware infrastructure is required.
Our journey has been one of growth and success which saw the business fast become a leading provider, building many testimonials along the way and winning awards. We are now seeing this success being translated on the international scene which presents another exciting chapter in our story.
How has your company responded to the COVID-19 pandemic?
There are two elements to this: firstly, as an organisation, we were able to move very quickly to remote working to protect our staff, just by the way we’re structured.
Our primary focus was to our existing customers; We wanted to ensure they were able to fully utilise the system to help them manage their way through these challenging times. There was an immediate response and we’re very proud to see the system bringing about demonstrable benefits during a difficult time.
Some of the things we did, were creating COVID-19 events and that would be anything from having someone who was symptomatic in the organisation and dealing with that from isolation procedures right through to there being a specific infection outbreak and invoking business protocols very quickly.
Radar has a high level of configurability which allowed us to create and disseminate COVID-19 related events quickly to our customers. The second part was more around what process and protocols we need to put in place to manage this going forward. After the immediate reaction, we had to think about how we can support infection control. How do you put in place both procedures and protocols to protect residents, patients and the staff; a number of infection control audits, risk assessments and further developments of system.
COVID-19 hit very quickly and with our new customers we quickly adapted their traditional on-boarding process. This enabled us to rapidly deploy the system and deliver much needed support and benefits at a very challenging time. In one case working with one of the largest care providers in the UK we were able to deploy the initial COVID-19 event within 4 hours.
At the end of the day, technology has definitely played its part in helping organisations manage through this crisis; how quickly people have been able to adopt and adapt, I hope we see this continue into the future and people will see that technology has a part to play in what is a severely challenged sector.
As CEO, have there been any specific leadership challenges that you have faced?
Nothing internally, although we did make a decision very quickly that we would not exploit the situation and ensure only supportive and helpful information was disseminated. The second part was all the work we did with our existing customers, we didn’t charge for that and so the challenge was how do you supply all that resource and time with no commercial cover; we just took the decision that actually it was the right thing to do; we just applied the resources and got help out to our customers as quickly as we could.
Could you tell me about one of your customer projects over the last 12 months?
We’ve had an amazing year; acquiring customers from all parts of the sector including NHS Trusts, social care providers and some of the biggest brands in the UK. It has been exciting working with some of the larger complex organisations like the Sanctuary Group and Cleveland Clinic where they’ve adopted Radar to consolidate lots of systems along with delivering the key benefits we have mentioned.
One of the standout projects for us was an organisation that was rated as inadequate by the CQC. They quickly identified Radar as a system that would be able to support them in bringing about change and delivering rapid improvements and benefits to the organisation.
Aligned with the management team’s commitment and dedication to improve, we were able to deliver an incredible outcome for all and saw their CQC rating move from inadequate to good within 6 months. Very proud to hear that Radar was instrumental in achieving this result.
What are you working on at the moment and what is coming up over the next 12 months?
We have several projects on the go at the moment within the NHS and primary care. We are also looking at how we support population health management, the integrated care systems, the CCGs and the PCNs. Radar has a high level of configurability and interoperability which lends itself to helping the sector realise many of the long-term plan initiatives and deliver true integrated care.
Our international expansion continues with Radar being chosen ahead of the competition within the UAE for a large-scale deployment across hospitals and health centres.
We also have an exciting year ahead as our advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities are being applied across several settings to help organisations make informed decisions along with delivering much needed automation.
We see that this integrated care system approach, advanced analytics, AI and machine learning can genuinely drive improved outcomes for our customers and the sector.
Can you tell me about some of the challenges and successes your company is facing?
Recruitment is always a challenge because we have set the benchmark high in terms of the calibre of staff we want to acquire. Managing our growth whilst ensuring this is done at a sustainable rate is of great importance to the business. We want to ensure our high standards of customer support and reputation for successful delivery is not impacted in any way
In terms of successes, our continued growth and customer acquisition aligned with customer advocacy and testimonials is a key measure of success for us. In addition, we’ve been displacing the previous market leaders which reflects the hard work but also how great the platform is; we are being selected over those systems repeatedly and seeing that on the international scene as well.
Can you tell me about something that you are particularly proud of?
It has to be the advocacy and testimonials; from a marketing perspective you want to develop those and nurture those user cases, but these are unsolicited thank yous directly from the people who are using the system. Knowing we are delivering value, benefits, and improved outcomes for both the organisation and the patient fills you with pride.
Also, the way we’ve pulled together as a business and have been able to support our customers through times like these; and being able to have such a positive impact is something that makes me really proud. We’ve had customers come to us and within hours, we’ve been able to help them – and that just shows how far we’ve really come.
What’s the best piece of business advice you’ve ever received?
There are two pieces of advice I was given:
Firstly, ‘you should always surround yourself with people better than yourself’ – I’m a great believer in that and I’ve been successful on numerous occasions mainly because of the team you have around you. That is first and foremost for me, get great people and surround yourself with them and you’ll do fine.
Secondly, ‘if somebody does something wrong, it’s their fault, and if they keep doing it wrong it’s your fault’ – when you apply this in business it is so true; if you let people continue to fail, ultimately it is your failing and you’re not addressing it; this quote has always stuck with me.
What’s your favourite entertainment programme at the moment?
I’m binge watching Better Call Saul on Netflix, I’m loving that at the moment as I’ve watched the whole Breaking Bad series; obviously he’s a character that has spun out of that.
