Initiatives

Shared Service Layer - Referrals

INT-309-796

About

Why the work is being done

Catalyst aims to help civil society organisations to reuse more tech, rather than building custom solutions each time. In order to do this we have set up a series of interventions, one of which is service platforms.
 
A Service Platform is a turnkey solution to a problem, which just requires deployment, configuration and a minimal amount of customisation before use in a service. 
 
This project is for the delivery of some prototype interventions around a specific subject - Referrals
 
Referrals are when one organisation refers a service user to another organisation for specialist care and support. Many charities receive referrals from local government, local healthcare providers and other charities and need to publish in a secure way which services they offer. Other charities may keep a database of specialist providers to whom they refer individuals. The numbers of these referrals is increasing, as practices such as social prescribing are increasing.

Problem to solve

How might we create prototypes that store, consume and publish data about referrals using the Open Referral standard?

Who are the users and what do they need to do

Software developers and project managers in digital suppliers supporting charities.
 
Digital teams within charities and civic society organisations

Description of the work:

  • Synthesising the user needs and personas of up to five charities across Development and Definition. 
  • Designing and developing prototype solutions which support the user needs of charities and which adhere to the Open Referral standard being adopted by local government. 
  • Consulting with a group of stakeholders working on the Open Referral standard to ensure that the prototypes fit with their needs, expectations and behaviours.
  • Testing the prototypes with organisations which publish and consume data on referrals.

Expected outputs include:

  • Standardardised documentation for the product, including detailed instructions for creating instances of the product in local, staging and production environments
  • API documentation
  • Configuration documentation
  • Weeknotes for the process of development
  • Weekly project updates
  • Commented source code adhering to best practices
  • Product deployed to an alpha environment


Key project resources

Open Referral UK launch event
Open referral standard event with reps from local government and Chris speaking from third sector viewpoint. Video will help frame where this open referrals project fits within the overall open referral standards work.