Greater Manchester Combined Authority
Integrating GMCA’s Early Years Service with EMIS and SystmOne
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Background
Through the Greater Manchester Strategy, Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) has a big focus on school readiness, including the city region’s five-year aim to better the national average for the proportion of children reaching a good level of development at the end of reception.
This, along with an ambition in Greater Manchester’s Digital Blueprint to ensure that everyone in Greater Manchester can benefit from the opportunities digital brings, led to the launch of GMCA’s Early Years digitisation project, driving forward the aim of giving children in Greater Manchester the best possible start in life.
GMCA developed an ‘Early Years’ App to digitise the paper-based assessments that were being used to review a child’s development up to the age of 2.5 years. Through the development of the app, GMCA wanted to establish a central resource to collect and present data from services (including midwifery, health visitors, speech and language specialists), parents, and guardians in one place. This would give these groups access to both completed assessments and other supporting information, giving users much more control over their own data.
The Need
GMCA developed the Early Years App with the aim of automating the sharing of data with relevant professionals to enable the timely identification of required support whilst reducing duplication of effort.
The vision for the app was that it would work as an integrated and centralised system that displayed the relevant completed digital assessments to facilitate better identification of support. But in order to achieve this, the app needed to be integrated with electronic health record (EHR) systems EMIS and SystmOne to give users access to all the information they required within the app.
The Solution
Our role was to support GMCA as their expert integration partner. The brief was to enhance the Early Years App by integrating data in order to improve user experience and, ultimately, the quality of Early Years services.
Key Aims
- Integrate seamlessly with EHR platforms including EMIS and SystmOne
- Reduce the duplication of data entry
- Improve data quality by reducing human error
- Promote cross-sector system interoperability
Our experts built a microservice to integrate GMCA systems with EMIS and SystmOne seamlessly. This created interoperability between the Early Years App and leading primary care EHRs, improving the visibility and quality of data.
The result is that searches for a child’s patient data in the Early Years App will now trigger a request to the microservice, ready for the Early Years App to consume and present the data to the user.
Our microservice is responsible for data transit requests. The Early Years App triggers the microservice, which in turn uses websockets to send data to our service app to run the logic that retrieves and pushes data. Once the service app finishes this operation, it pushes back a response (which may contain data), back to our microservice, in order to deploy it to the Early Years App.
The bespoke integration solution we built doesn’t involve a license fee model, allowing GMCA to take complete ownership of the integration and adapt this as required going forward. It’s a niche approach that not many other providers are able to offer, meaning the interoperability of the app can be altered and improved in the future based on changing needs of the city region’s population.
The Impact
Our team had to overcome several technical challenges over the course of this project. Although there was an initial plan, things quickly evolved as we got deeper into the Early Years App network and the need to scale both solutions efficiently. This is where we developed our service app, which allowed us to scale logically, without having to rewrite software later down the line.
The integration of the Early Years App with the electronic patient records will improve the visibility and quality of early years data and enable professionals to make better informed and more timely decisions.
The interoperability we have created will ensure that both Early Years professionals and parents/carers in Greater Manchester have a seamless digital experience when using the Early Years App.
The work also supports Greater Manchester’s ambition to develop the Early Years Integrated Solution; a solution that transforms current paper-based processes and bridges public sector organisations and local authority boundaries to improve the sharing of data and delivery of early years services across the city region.
“The Early Years app is a huge step forward for our city region and will hugely boost our aim of giving children in Greater Manchester the best possible start in life. In order to execute our vision, we needed the help of a technical partner with a proven track record – and this is where 6B came in.
6B’s technical knowledge and practical integration experience has been vital in making this app function how we envisaged it would. They were also aware of the ethical and privacy considerations that any app involving children would need to meet. We expect the integrations 6B has been supporting us with will further enhance the app and help us deliver further benefits to the parents, guardians and relevant professionals across Greater Manchester using the app.”
– Phil Swan – Greater Manchester Combined Authority