Mike Taylor makes the front cover of Care Home Professional

Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Mike Taylor, shares with Care Home Professional how a focus on partnership and innovation helps Radar Healthcare ensure organisations can deliver the best quality care.

Since joining Radar Healthcare in December 2021, how have you refocused the development team to ensure customer experience remains a priority?  

“One of my main areas of focus has been looking at our development strategy in terms of our key care and NHS partners, both locally and internationally. The beauty of our software and pricing structure is that it is very scalable, it can be installed in one care home or 500, meaning all our partners are different. They might be replacing their current system or be completely paper-based and going digital for the first time. It is important to have the right conversations at the very beginning and understand their objectives so we can make sure Radar Healthcare will work for them.” 

How does digital innovation play a role in helping Radar Healthcare stand out?  

“Yesterday’s innovation is tomorrow’s norm so as a company we have to keep up with the trends but what makes us different is how agile we are, enabling us to be the first to market for new initiatives such as the NHS Learning from Patient Safety Events (LFPSE) system.” 

What does the innovative product roadmap look like for you and your team?  

“The innovative product roadmap is the ‘what’ for our partners, my job is to build a strategy on the ‘how’ for them. How do we facilitate a new feature in the software? How do we use the skills and resources in the team to do that? What does that mean in terms of the technology required, the infrastructure involved, and how will it affect the usability for the end-user? 

A growing factor of any software provider is integration and interoperability. When we have a new partner, they will typically have other software or systems where they need to record information so the integration of connecting software A to software B is incredibly important.

The development of our Application Programme Interfaces (APIs) is something we are investing in; this will enable our partners to push data from their patient care systems direct into Radar Healthcare. they can harness the power of our analytics to significantly improve patient care.” 

What is one of the biggest challenges care providers faces when looking to implement new software and methods?  

“The fear of change. Partners will have spreadsheets and paper documents and no central system which is a big problem when it comes to breaching regulation. Digital recording also increases efficiency. When we have two or three ways of recording an event, the amount of people power that takes is huge and has risk associated with it again. If you are inputting incorrect or inconsistent data, it is only a matter of time before that will come back and bite you. Once a system like ours is in place, the staff can get on with doing what they are there for – which is to care for residents.” 

How does Radar Healthcare ease digital adoption for its partners?  

“Regardless of how good a system is, you only get out of it what you put in. We invest an incredible amount of time and resource into developing an efficient and simple user interface that will generate insight and learnings for the organisation. 

If the system is user-friendly, the customer experience is great, the data input is straightforward and the insights are accurate, then this will result in excellent patient care. Radar Healthcare is highly customisable and can be built in multiple ways but our CSMs have been doing this a long time and can share good practices from other clients. 

Listening and working together to understand what our partners want to achieve is something we pride ourselves on. A quarter of our change requests have been implemented because of customer feedback via our forums and there are another 17% in the planning stage.” 

What does the future of digital systems in healthcare look like?  

“Technology gets really exciting when combining systems like Radar Healthcare. Using analytics and artificial intelligence, we can start to use this data to predict and avoid events like falls for residents. That will be saving lives through technology.” 

Finishing comments 

“At the end of the day, our software exists to make the lives of our users simpler, more efficient, and, most importantly, compliant, so they can concentrate on delivering the best quality of care to their residents and patients.  

This is what makes the future exciting, our software has been designed to make sure, we can constantly evolve with their needs, and with technology as innovative as it is, we will continue to work in partnership with them to get the very best out of our system.” 

Read the full article in Care Home Professional, or book a demo to see how we can help your care home.