By Radar Healthcare
The future of patient communication with Radar Healthcare Digital Consent: a platform that goes beyond a signature to uncover hidden patient safety risks
The future of patient communication is not simply about providing information to patients, it is about ensuring they understand it, act on it and are empowered to make informed decisions about their care.
This challenge is particularly evident within informed consent. While consent remains one of the most important processes in healthcare, it is often still treated as a standalone administrative task focused on capturing a signature. In reality, informed consent is about communication and is the process through which patients receive information about their treatment, understand the benefits, risks and alternatives available to them, and make decisions based on what matters most to them.
As healthcare providers seek to improve patient safety and strengthen governance, the future of patient communication needs to be led by digital technologies that support understanding, transparency and organisational learning.
Why communication failures remain a significant challenge
Traditional consent processes often rely on paper-based or disconnected systems, creating challenges around consistency, accessibility and record keeping. Handwritten documentation can be difficult to interpret, information may be stored across multiple systems and organisations can struggle to evidence exactly what information was provided to patients and when.
For healthcare providers, consent failures pose significant financial and clinical challenges. Between 2019 and 2025, nearly £460 million was paid out by NHS trusts and independent sector providers in claims relating to informed consent failures*. While these figures highlight the direct impact of consent-related issues, they may only represent part of the picture.
Communication breakdowns frequently sit beneath wider patient safety incidents without being formally recognised as the primary cause or a contributing factor. A patient may sign a consent form, for example, but later experience difficulties because they did not fully understand the risks of a procedure, the expected recovery process or important post-treatment instructions. In many cases, these communication gaps remain hidden within broader clinical events.
As healthcare organisations increasingly focus on patient safety and quality improvement, there is growing recognition that communication should not be viewed as a tick-box exercise but as a critical component of safe care delivery.
Connected patient communication with Radar Healthcare Digital Consent
Improving patient communication is no longer just a question of digitising paperwork. The focus is increasingly shifting towards how information, consent and governance processes can work together to support safer, more informed care.
Radar Healthcare Digital Consent sits within this shift, providing a way for organisations to strengthen the consistency of informed consent while also gaining deeper insight into where communication issues may contribute to risk or adverse outcomes.
Rather than operating as a standalone tool, it forms part of the wider Radar Healthcare quality, risk and governance platform. This allows consent activity to be viewed alongside related data such as incidents, complaints, audits, claims and organisational learning, creating a more complete picture of how communication flows across the patient journey.
For clinicians and care teams, this helps embed more structured and consistent approaches to consent, supported by clear workflows and standardised information. For patients, it enables a more coherent experience, with access to reliable, accessible information that supports understanding and shared decision-making.
EIDO Patient Information, which is embedded in Radar Healthcare Digital Consent, provides a trusted source of standardised, condition and procedure specific high-quality information to improve patients understanding of their care and support shared decision-making between patients and clinicians.
As part of this process, EIDO Patient Information also incorporates best-practice BRAN guidance (Benefits, Risks, Alternatives and doing Nothing), helping patients to fully understand their procedure and consider all available options as part of informed consent discussions.
As Rhian Bulmer, Chief Customer Officer at Radar Healthcare, explains: “Radar Healthcare is the only platform that combines EIDO patient information as part of its workflow while connecting consent directly into the wider risk, governance and learning processes. It helps organisations not only evidence consent but continuously improve how patients experience and understand their care.”
This connected approach enables organisations to identify and investigate consent breakdowns that may otherwise go unnoticed.When incidents occur, organisations can view and analyse consent activity alongside related events, helping to identify where communication or understanding may have broken down.
Digital consent as the future of patient communication
As healthcare continues its digital transformation journey, the role of patient communication will only become more important.
Patients increasingly expect information to be accessible, personalised and available when they need it. Clinicians require tools that support consistent, high-quality communication while reducing administrative burden. Organisations need assurance that communication processes are robust, evidenced and capable of supporting continuous improvement.
Radar Healthcare puts quality informed, patient‑centered pathways at the heart of governance, unifying consent, risk, and insight to turn data into learning to deliver safer outcomes at every step.
In doing so, it helps healthcare providers move beyond signatures and forms towards a future where communication itself becomes a powerful driver of patient safety, quality improvement and better outcomes.
*Source: Information and comparison analysis based on NHS Resolution Data: Number and Cost of CNST Claims Closed (or settled with a periodical payment order) between financial years ‘2019/20’ and ‘2024/25’ with a damages payment, where the Primary Cause is ‘Fail to Warn – Informed Consent’ (acknowledging that there will inevitably be gaps between incident occurrence and claim closure which may impact the timing of claims being captured, and due to the way data is recorded, claims may appear in more than one dataset).
