QCS vs. Radar Healthcare vs. Access - Which is best for you?
All social care services in the UK are obligated to conform to national standards to legally provide safe, quality care to service users. Fortunately, there are forms of digital software that allow them to follow these rules.
Care compliance is the process of following rules, regulations and laws related to health and social care practices. Compliance in health and social care can cover a large array of practices and consist of both internal and external rules.
On the other hand, guide and define all major decisions and actions within the care service, as well as all of the other activities that are carried out within the boundaries set by them. They highlight points of view held by the governing body of the care service and ensure that it’s translated into clear steps that result in an outcome that is compatible with that view.
A range of software has been developed to help care providers better manage their compliance and policies and procedures. Each of these systems differ in what they offer you, the challenges they solve and the processes they help improve.
Are you thinking about implementing care compliance and/or policies and procedures software but you don’t know where to start? Have you come across different providers and want to understand more about what they have to offer?
To help you understand more about what’s available, I’ve created this comparison of the UK’s top policies and procedures and care compliance software providers, consisting of QCS, Radar Healthcare and The Access Group (Access Care Compliance and Access Policies and Procedcures).
I have taken a closer look into these different options so and compared them, so that after reading this article you will be able to decide the best option for you with much more confidence.
QCS – Quality Compliance Systems
What is CQS?
QCS, meaning Quality Compliance Systems, is the longest established solution among those I’ll be reviewing in this article. The QCS system is essentially a library of digitised documentation, including policies and procedures, risk assessment and care planning guidance, and ‘toolkits’ (largely reading materials and helpful guides) to assist with CQC inspections. The system also has some additional features such as basic analytics.
QCS’ core offering is still their extensive selection of policies and procedures, which are automatically updated, helping you to ensure your policies and procedures are up to date and offering a less time consuming alternative to maintaining policies and procedures yourself or paying a consultancy to do so.
What Does QCS have to offer?
All of the tools and QCS policies and procedures offers care providers should assist you in ensuring regulatory compliance. Firstly by ensuring your policies and procedures are up to date and high quality. Secondly the supporting guidance could help you be better prepared for upcoming inspections by understanding what the CQC is looking for.
However, when compared with the other two software providers I’ll show you (Radar Healthcare and The Access Group) there is a clear difference. The latter two, both in different ways, offer more than just digital libraries of the documentation you need.
For example, QCS gives you a range of materials to help with preparation for inspections, and to understand the CQC inspection and rating criteria.
This will certainly help. But, on the other hand, Access Care Compliance has a full, digital process to conduct mock inspections, against the CQC inspection and rating criteria. It also has a full library of essential audits. After a mock inspection you use the solution to develop action plans to address weak and strong areas that you uncover.
The progress towards completing these actions is then tracked within the system to join up and drive the process forward. This is just one way it helps manage and systematise the process of improving quality.
So while QCS may still be the favoured option for some providers, it should be clear that there is software that has much, if not all of what QCS does, and then goes above and beyond what QCS currently offers. Particularly in terms of helping you drive up quality in a systematic way, and using data to give you much improved oversight.
Radar Healthcare
What is Radar Healthcare?
Radar Healthcare aims to improve the quality of care for patients and residents with the use of integrated systems that revolutionise how care services provide care. Their workforce compliance allows you to assign compliance and training requirements, look over knowledge and competency, and reassure you that your employees have read an up-to-date policy. This ensures that your staff are staying compliant while giving you complete visibility of everything that has been completed. Access the information you need at all times via their handy mobile app.
Keeping your care service compliant can be time-consuming and complicated without the right system in place. Workforce compliance is part of a large array of product modules which have been created to work together to make healthcare safer. This simplifies the complexity of quality and risk in all kinds of care environments, including residential, nursing and community care.
What Does Radar Healthcare have to offer?
With this software, you can customise, manage and track employee training, supervision, appraisals and compliance requirements. This allows you to stay on top of a fully competent and compliant workforce at the click of a button. New staff will be automatically allocated the right compliance and training based on their role, which simplifies workforce management.
As you know, preparing for CQC inspections and keeping up with regulations can be time-consuming. If you’re recording all of the information on paper or spreadsheets, things can easily be lost and it can be hard to find exactly what you’re looking for. With just a few clicks, you can put all of the information you need in one place with Radar Healthcare. The CQC’s new strategy has a strong focus on technology, so digital technology will play a bigger role in regulation.
Some of the benefits of using Radar Healthcare include evolving your care service from manual to digital methods of working. Everything you need can be found in one central system, which can help drive quality and compliance improvements. They also have the Radar Healthcare app which makes everything easier to access in your own time. In just a few clicks, you can prepare for CQC regulations and focus your time on providing high-quality care. The product modules and what they do include:
- Incident and event management – Provides tools that allow you to resolve events and learn from them. This is an optional module that lets you digitise your processes and standard operating procedures.
- Action and improvement plans – Fully integrated action plans that ensure any issues related to poor performance are identified quickly and efficiently managed and tracked.
- Audit management – Make sure your care service is always ready for inspections with Radar’s auditing software. Create, schedule and assign audit ownership while ensuring that they will be completed on time.
- Risk management – Identify, track and manage risks and other issues that could be a threat to your business model and prevent you from delivering quality care that’s up to standard.
- Workforce compliance – Assign compliance and training requirements, look over knowledge and competency, and get confirmation that employees have read an up-to-date policy. This will keep your staff compliant and give you complete visibility of completed tasks.
- Business compliance – You can track and manage all location-based tasks and recurring checks. Allowing you to manage all types of important business compliance-related activities.
- Analytics – A form of artificial intelligence that allows care providers to reach the highest levels of compliance ratings by using smart KPIs to automatically trigger actions that monitor and improve the compliance and performance of your care service.
- Document management – Scrap inefficient paper-based records and go paperless by storing and managing your digital documents and policies that can be easily accessed at any time.
The Access Group
The Access Group offers two (importantly, integrated) solutions in this space: Access Care Compliance and Access Policies and Procedures.
Together, these integrated pieces of software equip you with a complete digital solution for easier and more effective management of your:
- Governance
- Regulatory compliance
- Quality improvement
- Auditing
- Policies and procedures
Both are accessible via your web browser, and crucially also via mobile apps.
Improve your regulatory compliance and rating
Access Care Compliance
Access Care Compliance helps you monitor governance, regulatory compliance, care audits and clinical compliance across your care business. It makes these essential processes of operating a care service more efficient and easier to manage, especially at scale.
In care, you have to regularly audit processes such as when a care plan was updated, whether it matches the risk assessment and care assessment, whether it’s person-centred care, etc. You go through and assess the quality of processes with the documents you’ve got. Access Care Compliance lets you do this digitally, identify which areas you need to improve and generate action plans to make those improvements.
You can rest assured that it fits this process together in a neat way that’s easy to use and interpret. You can also use project management systems where you create an audit that generates an action plan. However, if you don’t do it, you receive an alert, which is extremely useful and beneficial to the care service.
Mock inspections in Access Care Compliance
You can also use Access Care Compliance to carry out mock inspections on your care services, using the same methods care inspectors use, making it easy to highlight areas that require improvement and improve your ratings which can also prove useful for established businesses too.
Here is a quote from one user of Access Care Compliance, Rachel Child, Compliance and Governance Manager at New Directions Flexible Social Care Services:
“Once we’ve completed the mock inspection, the action points then will be sent to the service managers with a date for them to be completed. I can then use Access Care Compliance to check if these action points have been completed and help managers towards completion. This means we can drive improvement in an organised, consistent way”
It comes with a full library of audits with a step-by-step guide on what you need to do. This gives an example of how to do audits in a structured way and saves time. It’s also integrated with other software on offer, such as the care rostering solution Access PeoplePlanner, which means there is no need to spend time and effort duplicating information between systems.
Like all Access Group care software, it's delivered through Access Workspace for Care, which brings all the systems you use together, accessible through a single sign-on. Giving you easy access to all the solutions you need to improve your care quality and manage your care operations with greater efficiency.
Access Care Compliance also has a handy mobile app that can save 50-60% of the time manual audits take. This shows in-depth evidence throughout every stage, including reporting and dealing with complaints e.g. the procedure that must be followed to ensure that best practices and policies and procedures are being met.
Access Policies and Procedures
Like QCS, this fully digital solution provides your care service with all the policies and procedures you need to ensure ongoing compliance with your regulator, in a single digital system. All policies and procedures are written by experts and kept up to date as regulations change. Much like QCS this means you avoid the time, headaches and potential uncertainty of managing your policies and procedures yourself, or the cost of using a consultancy to do so.
It integrates with Access Care Compliance creating a beautifully joined up solution.
Staff can use Access Policies and Procedures via an integrated mobile app, so they can easily access the specific policy or procedure they need when they need it. This is practically beneficial, as staff are never in doubt as to how to handle a situation. It’s also a great way of demonstrating to your regulator that you are ensuring staff have the information they need to deliver high-quality, safe and dignified care for people.
Our Summary - Which option is best for you?
To summarise, the goal of all three software providers is to save service providers time and money while ensuring that they stay fully compliant and meet the high standards set by the CQC.
Both QCS and Access Policies and Procedures address the challenge of having to create, update and maintain policies and procedures yourself. If that is the full scope of what you are aiming for then either will be a viable solution and your choice will depend largely on which solution you feel is a better fit for your service and your budget.
However if you are serious about driving up quality and compliance in your care service then the Access Group probably has the strongest overall offering – when taking Access Care Compliance and Access Policies and Procedures collectively.
Radar Healthcare on the other hand has a range of quality improvement processes that can help you manage these processes more effectively and give you better oversight over them. However it is somewhat of an adaptation to social care, rather than a purpose built solution and lacks the policies and procedures component available from both QCS and The Access Group.
So, while QCS and Radar both have very strong offerings in different areas, QCS in policies and procedures management, Radar Healthcare in quality improvement processes, neither offers both. The Access Group does and I would argue has as strong an offering (although not an identical) in both of these areas.
Of course you might expect me to say that wouldn't you? However, I truly feel this is an honest assessment.
Now, the decision is up to you and the best way to truly understand which system is best for your care service/s is to see a demonstration of all of them. You can also watch a demonstration of Access Care Compliance right now without needing to wait or talk to any salespeople.
But if you do want to ask any questions about Access Care Compliance and/or Access Policies and Procedures, just contact us.
