DSSGx 2019 Projects
The following projects were completed by the team of fellows, for DSSGx 2019.
Ofsted - Risk assessing foster homes
The goal of the project was to use a range of data both held by Ofsted and publicly available to build a risk model that identifies foster homes for children that are at risk of providing sub-standard care.
This risk assessment needed to fit within Ofsted‘s decision making process and help inform Ofsted’s decisions about when to inspect providers with the primary aim of increasing the number of children receiving a better quality of care and education.
Homeless Link – Prioritising alerts
Homeless Link have an app called StreetLink so anybody can send them alerts from their mobile with a geo-tag when they spot a rough sleeper. Alerts are reviewed by volunteers to see if there is sufficient information to send local service out to help and support. But with up to 1,000 alerts a day during winter, it can take days for volunteers to review them all, by which time the rough sleeper has moved on, with just 14% being found by local services.
DSSGx has worked with Homeless Link and built a data science model to review and prioritise the alerts more quickly, so services can find more rough sleepers and more quickly.
Cochrane - Keeping up to date with new research
Doctors face daily decisions about the best care for their patients, and their own clinical experience can be enhanced using evidence-based medicine, such as through clinical trial data. One of the most robust ways of synthesizing research evidence across healthcare trials is through a systematic review. Cochrane is a not-for-profit organization that creates, publishes and maintains systematic reviews of health care interventions.
Cochrane systematic reviews provide high-quality, relevant synthesized research evidence to decision-makers at the international, national and local level, to make sure citizens receive the medical and social care based on the best available evidence. While this is a rigorous approach, it can take up to three years to produce a major systematic review, which limits our ability to use up to date research to guide decision-making. The goal of this project is to build a system that identifies relevant studies prospectively.
West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) - Mapping Inequality of Transport
WMCA is a cluster of 18 local authorities and four Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), working collaboratively on many projects ranging from transport, jobs growth, industrial strategy, public service reform etc. to deliver their vision of a more prosperous West Midlands. As the region grows, both economically and in terms of population, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure high quality and equal access to transportation.
The goal of the project is to make transportation access in the West Midlands region fairer. The partner has indicated there is a problem of areas being isolated from public transport lines, with poor access to private vehicles and have a congested highway network – this is particularly prevalent among areas with high minority and low-income populations. Although the partner has some instinct on which areas are experiencing isolation, the volume, scope, and extent of the problem has not been analysed and quantified.
The project involves finding a better way to measure equity of access to transportation services, and creating a data product which allows policy makers to analyse if and where the disadvantaged people live, if the system as it currently is does not serve any particular demographic group, and offer insights on how to make transport better and fairer.
DNCP - Anomalies’ detection in Public Procurement Processes
Public contracts are essential in the delivery of goods and services that people care about and depend on, such as schools, medicines, and roads. Currently, more than 400 public institutions are using Paraguay’s National Directorate of Public Contracting (DNCP) online platform to publish their public tender processes, which results in more than 13,000 processes every year.