Swindon Borough Council
Data sharing, quality & accuracy: Streamlining social care records with RPA
Driven by its continued dedication to its residents, Swindon Borough Council implemented the use of robotic process automation (RPA) to update its Children’s Services system. Migrating over 200,000 records to implement an interoperable system for its community-focused teams, the council aims to improve its support of over 230,000 residents through digital transformation – all with resident experience and welfare at heart.
The Challenge
Originally, community focussed teams at Swindon Council recorded social care data across disparate systems, with different departments utilising different technologies. This posed a number of challenges – such as informational discrepancies between systems, and data sharing barriers between teams.
To address this, the council recently procured a new system, CareDirector – allowing clinicians and social workers to record and share care information within its Community Health, Mental Health and Social Services teams. In order to implement the upgrade, the council was required to move its entire Children’s Services system from existing infrastructure - CapitaONE and Civica – into CareDirector. However, the sheer volume of data held meant manual extraction and migration simply wasn’t feasible.
The solution
After successfully uplifting its Free School Meals applications process with Automate, NDL’s robotic process automation (RPA) toolkit, the council decided to utilise the technology again in its CareDirector migrations. To ensure the project’s success, the council enlisted the help of NDL’s Delivery team to scope and support the migration in manageable steps.
The first stage of this migration occurred within CapitaOne. All Social Care records held within this system were integrated into CareDirector by Automate Bots – emulating the same data input method a person would follow. The second step of this migration involved the extraction and integration of over 130,000 Child Services documents from the Social Care module held within Civica into CareDirector. Completed by Automate Bots in just a few days, this migration would have taken the council weeks to complete manually.
The benefits
The successful implementation of CareDirector now means that the council’s teams can record and share data accurately and within the same system – resulting in congruent and improved care plans for its residents. As the council was able to use its existing product licence, no further investments in software were required. However, the project has delivered numerous other benefits, including significant time savings, improved data sharing capabilities and error-free data migration.
The replicable nature of this project – along with the support and knowledge gained throughout its collaboration with NDL – has allowed the council to continue its RPA journey independently. It has since completed a number of further migrations and synchronisations with Automate, including the migration of over 43,000 records within its Educational Welfare and Housing systems in just over a day.
- Improved resident experience
- Significant time savings for community-focussed teams
- Better document management for council workers
- Improved data sharing & accuracy
- Increased efficiency throughout processes
What’s next?
The council plans to continue its digital transformation with the use of NDL Automate, with its next projects targeting improvements within its Educational Welfare and Housing systems. To ensure up-to-date information is accessible for its special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) team, the council is currently working on data synchronisation between its CareDirector and CapitaONE systems. It has accelerated the uplifting of its digital processes for a huge number of its internal teams – leading to a better experience for both its residents and internal teams.
Interested to learn more about this project, or how RPA could benefit your organisation? Don’t hesitate to get in touch with a member of our team. For more inspiration, visit our ever-growing library of real-life public sector use cases, or hear project stories first-hand at one of our upcoming events.
“NDL Automate gives us a lot of flexibility to tweak and optimise the function of the bot processes - for example, when adding logging/reporting to analyse performance. The scripted approach has allowed us to create a ‘template’ that we can reuse and expand on as new requirements come along.”
Katrina Dias, IT Developer