“Our challenge is huge, but so is the prize. Think of the lives of the most complex families in our country. Let’s be honest, the way we presently engage with many of those families often does not help them overcome the challenges they face.
Community budgets are based around two simple principles – rework the way we engage with people, and have a budgetary world which incentivises the right solution”
Cllr David Parsons, Chair of the Local Government Association Improvement Board
Delivering a ‘whole area’ approach to public services has been backed by both the previous and current Coalition Government. The potential prize is significant, estimated at £20bn over 10 years.
Pilot projects, looking to test these ideas and benefit projections, have highlighted a number of challenges that range from;
- whether efficiencies, often predicated on early intervention will materialise
- how to bring together multi-disciplinary teams to deliver joined up services,
- whether Central Government departments can give up their ‘silo’ control,
Of these challenges, the first is critical to creating the momentum and breakthrough cultural and political barriers. Future pilot projects will need to get much better at quantifying and demonstrating efficiencies.
However, the majority of local and central government departments lack the strategic methods and processes required to develop robust benefits cases; benefits cases that can be systematically developed and, critically, tracked.
Tracking projected benefits is particularly fraught, reporting systems have typically been designed to report aggregate statistics – these systems cannot differentiate between people that have experienced joined up services from those that haven’t.
This lack of visibility lies at the heart of the benefit tracking issue and ultimately the success or failure of the Community Budgets initiative.
What we offer
The Insight solution allows analysts to distinguish citizens on the basis of the services they receive (from different teams and organisations) and track outcomes for these citizens.
The ability to develop a time based view (longitudinal view) of outcomes for citizens and the services they are receiving lies at the heart of the ‘joined up / intervention’ argument.
In addition the Insight solution also allows users to implement ‘predictive risk models’ that operate at the individual citizen level, for example predicting care home admission risk. This capability can be used to develop a statistically robust view of future service demands and to model how this demand varies based on commissioning decisions.
Insight can be used as a standalone analysis platform or can generate batch data feeds to enhance existing data warehousing environments.
The solution is deployed on a 'Cloud' computing basis at a data centre that is being accredited to sit on the secure GovConnect network. Because of this approach the solution does not require a big technology integration / implementation project at client sites and can be implemented in a few months.
In summary, Insight has been designed to deliver the enhanced commissioning and benefits tracking capabilities required to underpin the Community Budgets initiative, both short term pilots and future transformation.