A fast-growing Lancashire-based health tech agency is looking to recruit five new members of staff after moving into new offices.
Redmoor Health has carried out 270 training webinars to an audience of mainly 4,337 NHS and GP practice staff during Covid-19 while its new support centre has also handled 1,114 queries.
The company brought forward its growth plans when more Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and GP practices across England sought their help in using technology during Covid so they could assess patients online rather than face-to-face.
Redmoor Health has also trained staff at care homes so elderly residents can see a GP remotely and reduce the risk of contracting coronavirus.
During the pandemic the company has doubled its workforce from five staff to ten and now it’s looking to recruit up to five more members of staff as it expands its services further.
To support its growth strategy it has moved into new 1,000 sq ft offices at the Business First Park in Preston that are four times larger than its original space.
“The beauty of technology is that it enables you to go anywhere,” said Marc Schmid, who founded Redmoor Health in 2017. “We’re now working remotely UK-wide as far afield as London and Wales. Technology gives you the ability to record the sessions and it’s all backed up by a support centre.
“The other big area for us is the digital inclusion agenda to enable patients to engage through technology. There’s no point in running all your sessions remotely through video if your patients can’t physically understand how to use Microsoft Teams. You need to bring your patients with you.
“Our programme of improving the quality of online services is proving extremely popular across the country. Commissioners are eager for our experienced team to work with them and their practices to improve the overall quality of online services across primary care – something which is needed more than ever during these challenging times.
“The NHS has invested a considerable amount in technology over the last three years so it’s great to see many areas are turning to our experienced team to help get the best out of that technology to improve the quality of the services they provide and the benefits to the patient.
“Our ‘Redmoor Way’ programme takes the learning from hundreds of practices we work with and shapes it into a support programme that helps them on their digital journey. In essence we are being brought in to coach practices to get the best use of whichever technology they have been tasked to use.”
Redmoor Health has so far supported 500 GP practices during the pandemic with their video group clinics and another 150 in growing their Facebook communities online.
Mr Schmid said while there was a place for homeworking it was important to create a blended working environment.
“Not everyone wants to work from home or has the space to do so,” he said. “We needed a larger office space and then a space became available for us at Business First Park in Preston, where we already had a small office, and it was perfect for us.
“If staff are running external training sessions they now have the option of doing it in a designated glassed off office space.
“The larger office makes it easier to collaborate and once the lockdown has been eased we will be introducing a blended working environment which will, in my view, become the future of office working.”
Redmoor Health has also launched a support centre for customers that has been compared to the film character Nanny McPhee.
“When we work with clients we identify what their existing output is and then develop an improvement plan,” explained Mr Schmid. “We then hold their hand through that process and follow that journey.
“When we were running training sessions people were coming up with questions that weren’t typical helpdesk IT questions. They were things like ‘can you run over that bit of training again?’
“This is where a lot of training providers struggle because they can’t do the follow-ups. You can direct people to written information but we don’t think that’s effective so we made a commitment to set up a support centre that is run by our training staff.
“Our support centre has been compared to Nanny McPhee in the sense we get brought in to help practice staff and when they don’t need us anymore we walk away – although we’re always at the end of the phone.”
Redmoor Health has also joined forces with US-based Eko Health as the UK’s only distributor of the range of Eko health digital stethoscopes and telehealth software.
In addition the tech company has won a contract to train clinicians and GP practice staff on using new technology including Microsoft Teams, in particular showing them how they can develop group video consultations.
They have also been tasked with delivering a national training webinar for the NHS on using video to support care homes as well as supporting practices to use video software.
