Leeds City Council and Calderdale Council announce successful IT bid win

A successful bid for funding by Leeds City Council and Calderdale Council is being celebrated as both councils announce they have been awarded a grant from the Local Government Association’s Digital Transformation Fund following 110 submissions nationally.

The grant, worth £40,000, will be used for further development of an open source platform for both health and social care.

Ripple, a clinically led and technical team hosted by Leeds City Council, will work with both councils to continue building a demonstrator to showcase the open platform and its underlying data models to interested parties nationally and potentially internationally.

Dylan Roberts, chief digital officer, Leeds City Council, said:

“We are pleased to work alongside our neighbours, Calderdale Council, to showcase the use of open standards principles promoted by the Government Digital Services. Work of this nature not only benefits people in our area but the development can be used by anyone else because it is open source and so can be shared.”

Iain Baines, head of safeguarding and quality at Calderdale Council, added:

“Thanks to the Local Government Association’s grant we can illustrate how social care can start using open data models - within an open source platform for health and social care. Building systems in such an open collaborative manner helps to ensure the technology can be adopted and adapted by us and still be scaleable, so that it can be used by other councils across the country.”

The integrated digital care record platform being developed by Ripple is intended to be flexible enough for coping with future changes because it is open source and abides by open standards, as well as the underpinning architecture. By having a flexible approach and technology, the intention is to have a model which can be adopted and then adapted in different areas to meet the specific needs of that particular health and care system. This platform based approach can meet a variety of needs, from small departments up to regional care records.

ENDS

1. Ripple is a community led initiative, funded by the NHS Tech Fund and hosted by Leeds City Council on behalf of the NHS Integration Pioneers - leading a collaborative approach to developing an integrated digital care record. http://rippleosi.org/ 
2. For media enquiries about Ripple, please contact info@rippleosi.org