Why data is the NHS’s most powerful tool for rolling out truly preventative care
A perspective from Paul Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Radar Healthcare
The NHS is in need of a transformation. At the moment we’re seeing rising demand, escalating costs, workforce constraints, as well as widening health inequalities, all of which create gaps in patient safety across the board.
Frankly, NHS Trusts deserve better. But in order to create better in a way that feels sustainable and truly patient-centered, we need to evolve beyond just reactive care. What the NHS and its patients need now is a new model rooted in prevention, early intervention, and proactive care, with data systems that don’t just describe the past, but shape the future.
The true cost of reactive data usage
So how is this current approach to data affecting those on the front line of healthcare delivery? In real terms this means fragmented information, lagging insights, and limited visibility across departments and services. Issues are only flagged once something has already gone wrong, an incident has happened, a complaint has been made, or a target has been missed. With a reactive model like this, even when an intervention does happen, the benefit is only felt by future cases. But for the patients that experience the incidents needed to flag these issues, the safety of their care has already been compromised. This is the true cost of systems that only use data to analyse what has happened, rather than understand what’s coming.
We don’t need more data. Just more clarity.
This isn’t because we don’t have the data. In fact, quite the opposite. NHS Trusts are overwhelmed with data. Incident reports, audit results, patient feedback, staffing levels, outcomes data, and inspection findings. There’s plenty of it. But as it stands, all of this data only serves to bring extra layers of complexity to an already crowded picture.
So if the issue isn’t needing more data, the solution is simply looking at what’s already there from a different angle. Presenting insights that create a clear story that’s timely, intelligent, and actionable.
This is the next step in the data evolution of our industry; using the wealth of data we already have to focus on prevention rather than reaction. Helping teams to anticipate harm, and make the best possible decisions for their patients.
Turning information into intelligence
Visibility over different types of information is still important, but visibility alone isn’t where the role of healthcare data stops. NHS leaders don’t need more datasets to just see what’s going on in their Trusts, they need to truly understand it, and know what it means in real terms. In other words, they need systems that reveal patterns, highlight risks, and prompt the right people to take the right action at the right time.
But to do this, you need a system that does more than just record incidents. You need a platform that connects what’s happening on the ground with a bigger picture. For example, if medication errors increase after a rota change, or falls begin to cluster in a particular ward or at a certain time, organisations need to quickly understand that these aren’t just isolated events, they’re emerging patterns in their patient safety. They need to be spotted in real time, and acted on quickly.
Staying up to date with evolving priorities
Bringing a proactive, preventative lens to healthcare data goes beyond responding to emerging issues in the here and now. The data system itself needs to respond just as quickly to changing organisation priorities, and what they need from their data in the future.
If we look at the last few years alone, our relationship with data has evolved in ways we could never have imagined a decade ago. And with new challenges and shifting focuses always on the horizon, data systems don’t just need to be able to quickly catch up with current priorities, but evolve alongside new ones as they develop.
That’s why it’s not enough to equip Trusts and healthcare organisations with a static, single-use system that serves the here and now. As our Project Management Lead, Jack Forshaw, summarises:
“Maintaining constant communication with the Trust is crucial for being proactive and quickly reacting to changes in priorities. We understand the need to be adaptive to any new developments within the industry or organisation. We continuously reassess priorities to ensure we maximise the benefits of the product and achieve our deliverables”.
It’s this kind of communication between Trusts and data system providers that ensure the right data points are highlighted, understood, and actioned, both immediately, and on an ongoing basis.
Instant visibility for quick action
Once priorities have been established, timeliness is one of the most important factors of preventative care. This is why providers need the tools to act as soon as a pattern begins to take shape. Currently, too many of these insights get buried, and swept up into reports that end up getting looked at, at the end of each month or quarter. Radar Healthcare exists to close the gap between information and action. With a live system, fed by incidents, audits, complaints and workforce concerns, healthcare providers can weave this information into patterns, action points, and automatically triggered alerts.
We’ve seen first-hand how Trusts using Radar Healthcare have been able to grasp trends months before they would typically be flagged in review meetings. Important insights that need quick action are no longer buried in static reports and siloed spreadsheets. It’s live. It’s visible. And it informs decisions in real time.
Culture change at every level of organisations
This kind of living, breathing insight brings a wealth of positive change to every level of Trust and organisation structure. From the top, we see leaders, board members and executives begin to have real confidence in their data, with the knowledge that they are making informed changes that will benefit their patients. With our system, they know that risk isn’t just monitored, it’s managed.
We also see front line teams start to feel truly empowered in their role. They have visible proof that their input and concerns are being actioned across their organisation, with the added ability to understand issues before they escalate. As one of our partners, describes:
“Working with Radar Healthcare is proving to be invaluable by bringing together all our incidents and events, audits, and continual improvements actions into one place. Empowering our workforce to be part of a proactive, caring, supportive environment, in which they can be proud to work.”
– Avery Healthcare
Not only does this empowerment grow their trust with their organisation, but also improves the safety of the service they deliver to patients.
And most importantly, patients are given more opportunities to share their experiences, and shape their own care. They feel the benefits of a care approach that isn’t reactive, but responsive and thoughtful, with their needs at the heart of it. We know this from simple and accessible patient feedback capture forms, allowing for both qualitative and quantitative patient data to be collated and quickly analysed.
For example, Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust use QR codes to capture patient and staff feedback, giving them more insights into the reality of their experience than ever before. Within one month of Radar Healthcare being implemented, the number of feedback responses increased from 14 to 82, subsequently growing to an average of 500 each month, an increase of over 3,000%.
Embedding a culture of learning, ownership, and improvement
When you achieve this top to bottom change across patients, staff, and leaders alike, that’s when you see shifts in culture towards truly proactive and preventative care. To be sustainable, a proactive and preventative culture relies on feedback as much as foresight. This can’t happen if learning from incidents and audits still only occurs in static reports or passive databases. In order to support this, organisations that want real, long-lasting change need learnings that can be tracked, shared, and visibly embedded.
That’s what Radar Healthcare equips teams with: complete, connected learning loops, across every stage of event capture and management. By having this more joined-up approach, teams that partner with Radar Healthcare, such as Circle Health Group, are able to identify issues faster. The learnings they are able to gain from the platform provide assurance to not only regulators and staff, but more importantly to patients.
Clear ownership and communication
When every learning point has a clearly marked owner, and every improvement is measurable, nothing falls through the cracks. One of the biggest themes in the feedback we get from our partners isn’t necessarily the adoption of the technology and the systems, it’s the shift that occurs when quality and safety becomes everyone’s priority, not just the remit of a single team. This shift is supported massively by having the right data in the right hands at the right time.
Another partner of ours, Somerset NHS Trust, has seen an improvement in their ability to respond to incidents and proactively manage risk, by enabling staff to access and analyse data in real-time. The ability to search for patient information quickly and efficiently using Radar Healthcare’s query builder has been particularly valuable.
“Because of the complexity of our organisation, we can’t link to a single health system. Radar Healthcare allows us to search by NHS number or local identifier, which has been a game-changer for managing patient information.”
What now? Where do we go from here?
The future of health and social care needs a new focus; data that is easily displayed and interpreted, with the ability to track, monitor, and demonstrate improvements, as well as flag up risk. By adopting this change in focus, Trusts and care providers can enjoy greater flexibility in how they think, and the culture of their organisation, and therefore in how they work, and the level of care they can give their patients.
This is a system we’ve already brought to 17,000 locations, with 160,000 active users every month. This is how we know that this shift in approach from reactive to preventative is transformational; because we hear it from our clients every day.
It’s a core belief at Radar Healthcare that data isn’t just a dusty back-office function. It’s the front line of safer care. From the organisations we partner with, we see the level of organisational transformation that’s possible when insight is treated as a driver of change, not just a record of history.
To NHS Trust leaders, you already have the data. The opportunity now is using it, connecting it, activating it, and translating it into real-time impact. That’s exactly what Radar Healthcare are here to do.
