Netcall 20 March 2019

Building healthier, happier communities.

Deep funding cuts have forced local government to find efficiency savings to maintain service delivery.
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“Our mission is to make digital change really people-centred, so the services we implement are great user experiences.”

— Paul Brewer, Director for Digital & Resources

Improving operational healthcare

Every local government council is facing changing lifestyles, an aging population and operating under a widening funding gap. Delivering services in a new way can provide the answer.  It also brings a new set of challenges.  

It is estimated that 27% of GP appointments could be avoided if better technology was used to coordinate between GPs and services. Patients suffering from social exclusion, debt anxiety, poor diet or lack of exercise are often responsible for repeat appointments, using valuable GP time. If these underlying problems were handled through other support services, overstretched GPs could focus on patients with complex medical conditions. 

The Coastal West Sussex Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) decided take to action. Now, with consent from the patient, the GP can refer them to a Social Prescriber.

Going Local

Connecting people with local support

Adur & Worthing Councils, West Sussex County Council and the CCG partnered to set up a new scheme. “Going Local” aimed to get people out of GP surgeries and refer them to non-medical community services instead. 

This social prescribing approach is based around a team of Community Referrers, who assess patients’ needs and put them in touch with local support. To be effective, a solid tech platform was vital. 

Adur & Worthing Councils had been using Liberty Create, our low-code solution, to replace legacy systems. They knew low-code could streamline processes for Going Local and their team were able to build the new digital solution, using Create, in just weeks. It currently delivers: 

  • Case management for referred patients
  • A service directory for matching patients to the right services
  • Appointments, reminders and communications tools to keep everyone in the loop

“We’ve already shown we can transform existing services with low-code. The ability to create new, digitally-enabled services proved our vision was been justified. Going Local is reducing the demand on GP practices, providing holistic help to patients, rather than pigeonholing them with a single health issue.” 

— Paul Brewer, Director for Digital & Resources

Supporting smarter public services

Encouraging early results led the CCG to extend the pilot to a two-year scheme. It also set up a steering group rolled out a plan to start a service user group. 

Adur & Worthing Councils went on to bring Going Local to the Netcall Community AppShare as an independent Create accelerator. They were the first local government community member to do so, and it is now available to other councils using Create to download and customise.

Innovation-on-Sea 

Paul Brewer has masterminded a very special transformation on the south coast. Adur and Worthing Councils consolidated operations in 2013, from three to two office locations, to provide more cost-effective services for citizens. This was the perfect opportunity to roll out their digital strategy. With a smorgasbord of 500 legacy systems and a generous helping of manual workarounds and processes – the timing couldn’t have been better. 

Paul assembled a cross-functional team to systematically design digital services and build them using Create. His digital squad, formed of citizen developers and traditional IT staff, are providing low-code enabled Innovation-as-a-Service as the council’s requirements continue to evolve.

Project highlights:

  • Providing simple, robust onboarding for new services and service providers 
  • Creating personalised portals to enable patients to see all communications in a single place 
  • Improving information sharing between all agencies dealing with individual patients 
  • Forecasting the need for services and measuring their effectiveness
  • Improving tenant services with housing repairs
  • Agile development for waste services
  • Delivering improved asset management.

“I’ve found the best things about Netcall’s low-code are how fast it is to build and that even ambitious end-to-end projects are possible. It’s intuitive and open, we can easily access data and connect to other systems. The forum on the Community is also fantastic – the Netcall team respond and contribute regularly.

It’s far from a faceless tech company – we’ve met several of the team in person. Knowing the people behind the product has made our ongoing communication fast and constructive, so the support is as efficient as low-code itself.”

— James Bovington, Senior Digital Developer

Watch our local government low code case studies on Adur & Worthing Councils:

Improving tenant services with housing repairs:

 

Agile development for waste services:

 

Delivering improved asset management:

 

Harnessing talent within the organisation:

 

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