Frontline worker review / rating approach
Almost all SPLW interviewed expressed nervousness about recommending anything that they have not visited. There is a recognition that additional information that can be included within OA may partially address this. There is a potential solution where feedback from visits from “peer frontline professionals” will normally provide adequate confidence for a referral to be made.
Currently this often happens informally within individual teams but the strategy here is to widen this peer network of trust such that if a fellow frontline worker (perhaps at ICP level) has given the ok, then they won’t need to check it out themselves. The recommendation is to explore this a bit further to identify a professional rating system that could use to provide confidence to . A small set of national pilots could define and trial the model to capture the impact in terms of improved productivity and increased numbers of referrals.
Technically it is not possible to add a professional rating to the OA data as this comes from the frontline rather than the activity providers. A suggested tooling would be to provide an API for SP Application Providers to read and write a professional rating to a provider/activity using a UUID for provider and the activity combined.
FW - Provide and read reviews from other frontline workers.
Improves confidence in the data
Sufficiency & demand
As take up becomes fairly mature, then the resulting open datasets will provide evidence of sufficiency and demand which would support managers and commissioners in spending budgets to provide local support. This in turn is useful information for the to meet the demand and of course the ApP to provide the software tools. This strategy suggests that some form of management information dashboard might allow a local understanding of what the current situation is and provide evidence to move things forward be you a manager or Activity provider or Application provider.
Left to innovators
For innovators
Richness checker
It is recognised that the quality of the data will be mixed. Various amounts of effort will be put into data entry according to the business case for that organisation. If the strategy of @Social-Prescribing-Ready Profile
is accepted then the ability to check that an Activity has completed all that data would be useful. This strategy suggests that a richness checker tool be made available so that ApP can surface the that have made the effort to meet the SP ready profile. This tool could be commissioned / commissioned by ODI and made available to ApP at a subsidised rate to incentivise adoption.
For innovators
Improves data quality and richness
Completeness checker
If are recommending that they would like certain fields completed before a referral will be made then as in @Social-Prescribing-Ready Profile
strategy then the would benefit from being informed of where their current entries fall short. This strategy suggests that an automated completeness tool would encourage and support an AcP entering the data to give them every chance of receiving a referral. This should also increase the quality of the data. This tool could be commissioned / developed by ODI and made available to ApP at a subsidised rate to incentivise adoption.
For innovators
Improves data quality and richness
Language translator
It has been pointed out that whilst SPLW tend to deal with language barriers in their own ways, it would be useful if the text available from OpenActive could be available in different languages. Effectively this should be left to innovators and wouldn’t be expected to be part of the OpenActive data set. Lancashire and South Cumbria are progressing with a pilot based on Open Referral Service unique IDs but this could be reused for OpenActive.
M, FW - encourage people to translate text
For innovators
Curation
ODI working collaboratively at national level
It is generally accepted that the OA data set is not adequate for a number of data consumer’s usage. This creates a demand for a commercial curation service. Currently there is only one commercial service. This commercial service is generally well received and provides value for money. However, due to the need for this service it does create a dependency risk which may put off some organisations and will put all at risk of price increases they might have to accept.
This strategy suggests some consideration of encouraging other commercial offerings to create some competition in the market and provide some fall back if any one organisation should close for whatever reason. Another alternative might be to work with the single commercial offering to provide some form of franchise across the areas of the country. Perhaps in similar way to the telecommunication and utility supply companies. This will help with the risk of scale if OA takes off and requires curation then this single supplier may struggle to scale.
For innovators
Improves confidence in the data