{"id":15469,"date":"2016-06-08T15:19:34","date_gmt":"2016-06-08T14:19:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/digileaders.com\/?p=15469"},"modified":"2019-12-23T16:40:19","modified_gmt":"2019-12-23T16:40:19","slug":"enhancing-lives-residents-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digileaders.com\/enhancing-lives-residents-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Enhancing the lives of residents through data"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wigan Council in Greater Manchester is utilising its digital interactions and data to transform its relationship with its residents and communities.<\/p>\n

The Council, recently named the Local Government Chronicle’s<\/a> ‘Digital Council of the Year’, has a wide-ranging digital strategy to drive behaviour change.\u00a0In this post Alison Mckenzie-Folan, Deputy Chief Executive, describes how big data is transforming, enhancing and even extending lives.<\/p>\n

Since councils were founded in the 19th<\/sup>\u00a0century they have existed to serve their communities.<\/p>\n

But how best do they achieve that service in this era of fast-paced digital change?<\/p>\n

At\u00a0Wigan Council<\/a>, where we provide more than 700 services to a population of 320,000 residents, we have been passionate about digital for some years and the power it holds for transforming services and residents\u2019 lives.<\/p>\n

The power of digital is integral to our deal with our residents \u2013 an informal agreement promoting self-reliance and community participation\u00a0\u2013 and our aspirations for healthier, cleaner and happier communities. One obvious example of how we are using data effectively is via online personal accounts, called \u2018MyAccount,<\/u>\u2019 which have 49,000 sign ups so far.<\/p>\n

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\nThrough MyAccount we can build up a richer picture of our residents and the services they consume. We provide tailored content, advice and guidance about services and use this data to develop services and a different relationship with our community.<\/p>\n

We have been using powerful personalisation platform\u00a0Agilsys Engage<\/a>,<\/u>\u00a0to help us learn more about customer behaviour and to disrupt poorly performing service channels and if necessary close them down. MyAccount can help us interact with engaged residents \u2013 but what about the most vulnerable in our communities?<\/p>\n

Our robust data sharing approach is directly helping those most at risk of poor health, low education outcomes and people most likely to be receiving help from multiple public service organisations. Of course these are also the residents costing the public purse the most.<\/p>\n

Our risk stratification tool was developed to establish someone\u2019s risk of being admitted to hospital and identifies those in the top 30% at risk of admission. This cohort has been used as a focus for our social services neighbourhood teams.<\/p>\n

Initial work has indicated a 35% reduction in A&E attendances, 43% reduction in non-elective inpatient admissions and 17% reduction in outpatient appointments. This is a fantastic achievement \u2013 using the power of our data to directly improve health outcomes for at-risk people. In Wigan we have pushed risk stratification further by taking advantage of our high match rate of NHS numbers across health and social care.<\/p>\n

This enables us to match data and look at service utilisation across both sectors to assess and predict service demand. We are rolling this approach out across wider public sector organisations to build a sister risk stratification tool, which will enable us to build in more data such as probation and housing data.<\/p>\n

Again this will allow us to better predict future demand and inform service planning.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, our Behavioural Economics Work Programme has helped us to target our interventions and communications to greatest effect.<\/p>\n

Successful examples include:<\/p>\n