Community Collaboration and Care

Building upon our experience of working in Local Strategic Partnerships with forward thinking and innovative local authorities, voluntary organisations and community groups we have evolved and implemented leading and comprehensive Community Collaboration and Care solutions, specifically designed to deliver locally distributed yet seamlessly joined up, citizen-focused, service provision.

The Health Secretary announced that specialised services will be introduced that will greatly enhance the role of the voluntary, private and charitable sectors in delivering more choice in the provision of care to the end user. This announcement will result in a greater collaboration and co-operation between service professionals, individual citizens, voluntary, charitable, community and special interest groups. These may include the local authority itself, often working in partnership with other local authorities in a regional context; voluntary organisations; housing associations; health authorities; commercial partners and other local and central government departments.

The overall objective is to tear down the traditional service boundaries, which too often impede the delivery of a seamless service to the most vulnerable with plans to provide new services for both children and the elderly with the introduction of Children’s Trusts and Care Trusts. Our solution is specifically designed for local authorities, voluntary and other organisations seeking to work in local strategic partnerships to deliver community, health and social care services and particularly services targeted at children and the elderly.

The drive for improved delivery and better management of services has to encompass all of these parties and the complex web of interactions and relationships that underpin them, with the ultimate aim of being able to audit track decisions effectively and enable all elements of the service to be monitored through an effective, local government controlled, scrutiny process.

Not surprisingly inter-organisational communications today often contain the same or similar information; several variations of a communication can occur and process steps are often duplicated in internal systems across the different partner agencies. The linking together of electronic information systems across different agencies is rare and all of the partners who are involved in local service provision rarely all see exactly the same information.

Our comprehensive Community Collaboration and Care solution provides a quick and efficient method for joining together processes and information flows across dispersed communities and service providers using an interactive, XML based, web services framework.

Example of information gateway user application at Barnsley MBC

Without replacing existing systems, our solution:

	links service staff to the specific information that they need for their daily activities in a highly visible and searchable format;
	automatically re-purposes information for target audiences, enabling the citizens who are the recipients of the service, or their families, to be part of the process, sharing information in a truly comprehensive manner.
	delivers multi-source metadata modelling enabling automatic categorisation of content, data indexing, searching and thesaurus constructs to associate and link together relevant information in a multi-service/systems architecture;
	manages, tracks and audits internal and external information and workflow processes with performance metrics that identify areas for future streamlining;
	provides for secure “closed” collaboration groups across the ‘case‘ community, with the potential for involving invited guests;
	delivers the modern planning, auditing and monitoring procedures and scrutiny processes required in today’s highly visible multi-agency service environment.

Utilising an Open Information Gateway to front-end established information systems we dynamically extract and join together relevant up-to-the-minute information from a variety of disparate systems and service providers and re-packages the information for different target audiences, service professionals and individuals. Without replacing established systems we are able to deliver a single, authoritative, web-based information source that facilitates partnership working and delivers improvements in working practices.

Our solution conforms to the e-GIF and e-GMS standards and administration is via a standard Internet web browser ensuring that information can be accessed by any authorised person from any location, at any time, day or night.