With the Horizon telephony rollout as discussed with Jason Wells last issue now complete, Unify paid a return visit to Care UK. This time we spoke with CIO Barry Nee who explained his passion for working at the company, shared his perspective on the working relationship with Gamma and talked of the wider opportunities for technology in healthcare.
Within a few minutes of arriving at head office for interview, Barry Nee knew instinctively that Care UK was the right place for him. Waiting in reception, he picked up the company magazine and began reading. A few hundred words in and he was convinced that this was where he was meant to be.
“I was struck by the fact that the articles were not about company executives or company achievements, they were about its patients, its service users and its residents. The more I read the more I thought ‘this is a company that really understands what care is about. I want to be part of this’.”
Six years later and Nee is the chief information officer for Care UK, the UK’s largest independent provider of health and care. In that role he is in charge of a 100-strong IT team and a significant annual budget. And as the company’s senior information risk officer, he is also custodian and guardian of all the patient data it holds.
“My most pressing concern is to see that we always do the utmost to deliver the best possible service to all of our customers,” he says.
Perhaps it is not surprising that he demands the same high standards of the technology vendors he deals with, among them telecoms provider and operator Gamma, the company that supplies the critical SIP circuits that underpin his service.
Care UK wanted to consolidate, modernise and future-proof a very large and diverse legacy telephony estate serving all of its 300+ facilities across the UK. With more than 2,000 lines plus extensions, PBXs and other infrastructure, the entire system was ageing and had become very costly and labour intensive to maintain.
With the Horizon telephony rollout as discussed with Jason Wells last issue now complete, Unify paid a return visit to Care UK. This time we spoke with CIO Barry Nee who explained his passion for working at the company, shared his perspective on the working relationship with Gamma and talked of the wider opportunities for technology in healthcare.
In this case the cloud offered a realistic and more economical alternative and Care UK turned to Gamma and its Horizon hosted SIP telephony platform. The end result is a flexible and easily managed, company-wide telephony system of some 3,500 extensions.
“A part of our job in IT is showing how things can be done better, more successfully. It’s important to try new ways of doing things,” Nee says.
“Gamma’s culture is closely aligned with our own and they have a great customer service focus which is hugely important to us,” he says. “Of all our IT suppliers, Gamma are almost an outlier in terms of the care and attention that they bring to their relationship with us. The Customer Advocate model in particular is a fantastic concept. Having someone that I know is putting forward my viewpoint, and at times, fighting in my corner within the four walls of a supplier organisation is very forward thinking.
“When we started to get to know each other, they really went to a lot of trouble to understand what our business does and how it works. They visited our locations, got to know who we are and how we work. In my experience that’s a real USP and unique in the industry. Their service is rock solid too.”
Nee does however qualify that last point. He points out that there have been a couple of outages that have affected the hosted telephony service he buys from Gamma. He accepts that temporary hiccups can be expected once in a while but is clear that it is how the supplier deals with the problem that matters the most.
“Gamma were completely open, honest and transparent from the start. They were very responsive and treated the matter very seriously indeed. There was no shuffling of responsibility. The CEO and MD came to see me personally, owned the problem and explained exactly what happened and why. That level of transparency is really important to me,” he says.
Having someone that i know is putting forward my viewpoint, and at times, fighting in my corner within the four walls of a supplier organisation is very forward thinking.
When we started to get to know each other, they really went to a lot of trouble to understand what our business does and how it works. They visited our locations, got to know who we are and how we work. In my experience that’s a real usp and unique in the industry. Their service is rock solid too.
Revolution
As he looks to the future, Nee also believes there are opportunities for trying new ideas in frontline healthcare too.
“It’s a real privilege to be working in IT in healthcare right now and we are starting to see the beginning of what could become something of a revolution.”
As an example he cites the way that algorithms are being increasingly used to make diagnoses easier.
“I think it’s important to be open minded about how technology can play more of a role. There’s a growing number of elderly and infirm people who need more and more care, yet there are fewer people coming into the caring industry. We need technology to make up that shortfall.”
