North Lincs creates local children’s data hub

North Lincolnshire Council is creating a local children’s data hub for connecting to ContactPoint, the national children’s database.
The council was originally part of a consortium established to run a ‘proof of concept’ to create a regional children’s data hub to benefit all frontline services.
The feasibility project, which ran for four months, involved extracting data from seven source systems across the councils involved, including EMS and CapitaOne education systems and SWIFT and CareFirst social care systems. The data was then loaded into a MultiVue Identification Server (ISA) from data integration specialists VisionWare to identify duplicate records between the systems and create one single view of each child.
VisionWare’s ISA application was also used to provide officials with a history of non-demographic data relating to each child, including transaction histories and key workers.
Tony Holder, senior business analyst at North Lincolnshire Council, explained: “We required a model which would address the issues that each council had with regard to data quality in their various systems, and allow us to be confident that we were connecting to ContactPoint with the most accurate and up-to-date information possible.
“A hub approach was the most logical way to proceed. The council was extremely impressed with the results and will now be working with VisionWare to create our own children’s data hub to connect to ContactPoint.”