Small scale funding supports 20 local government initiatives with the aim of reuse by other councils
Twenty projects involving 34 councils have won shares of a £560,000 fund for digital schemes put up by the Local Government Association (LGA).
While most of the cash has been shared out in £25,000 chunks, slightly larger grants of £40,000 have gone to four projects.
Adur & Worthing Councils and West Sussex County Council are getting the money to create a suite of digital services and apps around the existing Going Local community referral service; a group of Kent councils are developing an online triage homeless process; and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough are working on the No Wrong Place project to provide consistent information to customers.
Meanwhile, Leeds City Council and Calderdale Council are running the Ripple project to define open data standards underpinning the integration of health and social care. The money will be used on the development of an open source platform and the project team is working on a demonstrator to showcase the platform and data models.
The 20 projects were selected from 111 bids and are aimed at developing digital solutions that can be reused by other councils.
Transform services
Councillor David Simmonds, chair of the LGA's Improvement and Innovation Board, said: "This programme seeks to build on this good work by enabling a group of councils to use digital tools and approaches to support their wider work to transform local public services.
“Local government has made huge progress in enabling residents to carry out transactions online. Councils now need to build on this good work and fully utilise digital technology to help deliver more efficient services to manage rising demand and expectations from their residents.”
He added that the LGA has recently launched a blueprint for councils to maximise the use of IT to transform services for their residents.
The other successful bids were as follows:
- Bournemouth: integration of data across the council, health and range of partner agencies to support troubled families.
- Wigan: to develop a single view of a child's record to support integrated working across partners.
- Northumberland: to support the development of a cloud based public health portal enabling real time data.
- Bexley: to develop a data analytics system to link the existing Employment and Skills Management Information System, housing and troubled families data.
- Thurrock: integration of various sources of health and social care data.
- East Sussex: data matching and analytical tools for identifying and supporting vulnerable families and children.
- Blackpool: the development of a social care financial assessment app.
- Camden: integration of datasets from different partners supporting troubled families.
- Dorset: a business intelligence digital dashboard to deliver better targeted preventive services based on data to support children.
- Lewisham: an app for adult social care to provide access to information and services.
- Hounslow: a multi-agency intelligence tool for identifying the top 20 adults with complex needs and chaotic lives.
- Cumbria: live integration of GP and local authority social care records.
- North Somerset: creation of data analytic tools enabling early identification of families most likely to benefit from intervention.
- Worcestershire: creation of an information sharing platform for organisations involved in safeguarding children.
- Halton: an app to capture and analyse data from high risk patients with complex needs living at home or in residential care.
- Birmingham: an app that will include a selection of web forms and tools to aid workflow and education and healthcare plan processes.
Picture by TCAtexas, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
