Essex County Council is pressing ahead with a plan to create a prototype data sharing platform aimed at improving health, education, social and economic outcomes.
The council has published a tender for a supplier to build a predictive risk modelling tool that will produce a range of analytical reports and link with geospatial systems to provide a geographical view.
The prototype will initially focus on 4,000 vulnerable households, using anonymised data.
According to the council: “The project will provide meaningful data that enables partners to plan together with communities to enable resilience prevent demand and ultimately improve health, education, social and economic well being.”
The prototype will focus on households with prospective mothers and children under five years old “where the evidence base for early intervention is most robust”.
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The prototype project will run for 12 months, with an option to extend it for a further three years.
At the end of the initial project, the council will make a decision on whether to roll it out to other public service areas.
In November, Essex said that the platform must support the anonymization and psuedonymisation of data, the creation of unique identifiers at the source location, the ability for data sharing and matching, plus predictive risk modelling.
The council said it wants the solution to provide reporting through dashboards and reports aligned to geospatial software.
“The project has a number of significant information governance challenges, for example unique; identification; privacy notices and consent,” the council said.
“Therefore it is important to note that the data must be anonymised / pseudonymised at source and we are looking at all options around this function. The systems which provide pseudonymisation must be able to create a unique identifier for all partner data.”