The Beacon Health Group

The Beacon Group embarked on a major transformation project in 2020/2021 and this unearthed the issue that it has not been easy for staff to report or access records on important tools in a way that gave everyone from team members to partners the oversight and assurance that they needed. With 26,000 patients and the expansion from a small practice model to a medium-sized organisation, they were looking for something that could facilitate a more systematic and organised way of working that evidenced the hard work of the teams for total oversight and assurance.

“We're all really good people doing really good work. But you know, how do we evidence that as we go? And do we show that and how do we know whether improvements we're doing all of the time how do we know those things are having an impact? How do we know these things are working?”

By using InPhase, the Beacon Group can get the oversight and assurance that they were looking for. Once the user is signed in, using a single sign-on on any device for quick and easy access, they can get a comprehensive picture of performance from the at-a-glance dashboards that present a triangulated view of accurate and real-time data. Anyone in the team, including partners, can see evidenced actions and their impacts for assurance that everyone is pulling together in the right direction.

The Beacon Group had spoken to a few practices and had heard of InPhase being used by another surgery that had undergone a similar transformation process, which encouraged the Beacon Group to begin talks with InPhase.

The variety of functionality that InPhase offers appealed to the Beacon Group as well as the sustainability of using a digital system. With InPhase, everyone within an organisation has access to the same data at the same time which can be updated from anywhere by anyone who has access to the system. Also, a digital system is scalable to whatever size is needed, coinciding with the Beacon Group’s expansion and can continue to grow as they do. If any changes are made within the system, they can be done by the Beacon Group themselves and they are immediately deployed organisation-wide without having to wait for the supplier to make and deploy the changes.

“We like the ability to utilise existing stuff that is accredited, that they work with us to produce accredited new things as well because we will do some new tools and new forms and new approaches, I'm sure as part of all of this, but what we want to do is make sure as far as possible, everything we do is going to be CQC compliant. […] It's very, very important that we have somebody who complies not just with the software and the tools but also that kind of shared vision and suppose of how we wanted things to work in our group.”

The Beacon Group can empower their staff to take data, improvement and patient safety into their own hands and bring the team together in a way that might not have been possible or easy to do before. With InPhase, everything is integrated, so data appears in all of the relevant places as soon as it is inputted. Any member of the team can report a safeguarding concern, near miss or a significant incident and be assured that actions will be taken. As well as this, at any time, they can see the workflow stage the report is in and see what steps are being taken to assure safety and that it is being acted on.

“In a year's time, when I'm sitting as a partner, I have a dashboard in my head where I can just say, oh, look what's going on here. Why is that happening? And what do we need to do? That vision that Star Trek, but that's what I'd like.”

The Beacon Group will continue to roll out InPhase over the coming months, training staff in its usage with the accredited training tools InPhase offers in preparation for the Go Live stage. They look forward to providing that assurance, gathering that evidence and being fully prepared for CQC inspections in the future.

“I think I'd really want to encourage other surgeons to start thinking this way, you know, there's a terrible tendency to always think you just have to keep doing what you're doing. And we're all so busy in the day job, but actually, if you put a bit of effort into this, it'll make our day jobs easier.”