Care Quality
Commission

The clientanchor

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and social care in England.

They make sure health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate and high-quality care. They also encourage care services to improve.

The challengeanchor

The Care Quality Commission needed to transition away from paper-based processing and introduce a 'digital first' model, updating the way they engaged with the organisations they regulate as well as the general public.

Moving to a digital approach meant relocating the regulatory forms process online, whilst ensuring that the complex business rules, extensive manual validation and event-based notifications were all included.

The solutionanchor

Our team developed the platform for the Care Quality Commission in Drupal 7. Including a specialised custom form framework at the centre. This allowed us to move the regulatory forms via an Enterprise Service Bus. Creating forms with complex business rules and validation requirements.

We also developed a unique content management toolset giving us granular control of the content and set up conditional rules based on the selections made within form fields.

Several integrations were added to underpin these developments including the introduction of user login and authentication.

To do this we used a Care Quality Commission system based on Open AM. To send and receive data from the online service platform, we integrated with a Siebel CRM system.

Shortly after completion, the rejection rate of data and submissions dropped dramatically. There has also been a decrease in transaction times, helping with increased efficiency in this area of the Care Quality Commission.

The resultanchor

By the end of the first year:

• Monthly visitor numbers to the OLS portal were doubling month on month
• Two thirds of all PMS providers were using OLS (as opposed to paper-based alternatives)
• There were 9.5k activated OLS accounts – with 600 new accounts activated every month
• Over 70% of PMS forms were being submitted through OLS
• PMS OLS rejection rate was 40% lower than paper-based submissions
• 42,831 visited the OLS portal 88,519 times
• 820,766 pages viewed – an average of 9 pages/visit (compared to 4 pages/visit on main site)
• Users spent an average of 10 minutes on OLS portal/visit (compared to 4.5 minutes/visit on main site)

"We’ve been impressed with Axistwelve’s ability to meet the several high-profile deadlines, which have been delivered within budget and timescale. When we first embarked on moving from a Waterfall to an Agile methodology, Axistwelve were an instrumental guiding hand in helping us to mentor the CQC team members in the new approach. This has proved so successful in allowing us more flexibility of prioritisation and increased productivity that we haven’t looked back and now wouldn’t consider any other approach to delivering new software.

We believe that our success is, in part, down to the ‘whole team’ approach; internal CQC members and Axistwelve staff work as one team – with collaboration and trust empowering both sides to deliver high quality functionality. We have managed to create a personal relationship with the developers working on the CQC website, all of whom are based in London and, conveniently, only two tube stops away from the main CQC office.

I look forward to working with Axistwelve on our ongoing projects, and would recommend them to any organisation embarking on a similar journey."

Caroline Milton, Head of Public Digital Services