Hackney Council - Case Study

Hackney embarked on a transformation, focused on system-to-system information sharing, to ensure it could gain a more joined-up overview of any community member requiring support from the health and social care teams in real-time.

This multi-faceted project to change the way information is stored, shared and used to provide better patient outcomes, focused on better collaboration between four key data areas – Child Protection-Information Sharing (CP-IS), integrated teams, sustainable NHS numbers, and the CCG’s health portal (the Health Information Exchange, HIE).

Hackney Council knew that integrating the information recorded in CP-IS with other crucial health and social care data would enable its teams to create a single view of its service users and provide the best care to vulnerable children.

The Council worked closely with key Children’s leads both internally and externally to map out closer integrated workflows and pathways of care. The Council has a number of teams that use more than one system to record data, to ensure it meets the statutory requirements for health and social care. These integrated services are provided by Mosaic case management solution, which records social care intervention, and Electronic Patient Record (EPR) solution, Rio, which is used by health colleagues.

Hackney also needed to implement a simple NHS number solution that could be controlled by Hackney itself, for its own data. The Council was keen to transform its definition and treatment pathway for service users in an ‘episode of care’, and to improve data security and sharing between Mosaic, Rio and other systems if and when a defined episode was occurring.

How we helped 

The Council upgraded to the latest version of our case management solution, Mosaic, to ensure that CP-IS would work smoothly. CP-IS was implemented using new workflows that were reportable, establishing clear custodians to own processes and notification failures. Mosaic workflows were deployed to improve communication between integrated teams working on systems between health and social care to address practice, reporting and system issues.

Statutory reporting to NHS England and NHS Digital became a simple process. The NHS number look-up process was better integrated; it was built into the core child protection and Looked After Children (LAC) workflows, to enable the right information to be available to the right practitioner at the right time.

Workshops were held with partners from social care, acute, community health, GPs, ourselves and Cerner, to define what information was needed, by who, and for what purpose. A Data Sharing Agreement, signed by all partners, was produced.