Care Quality Commission

The Care Quality Commission 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 Care Quality Commission needed to transition away from paper-based processing. They needed to begin using a 'digital first' model. In the way that they engaged with the organisations they regulate and the general public.

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

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. This bespoke setup allowed for a granular control of content. Which used a user's role and permissions as the basis for control. We also set up conditional rules based on the selections made within form fields.

To underpin these developments our team also added several integrations. The first was to carry user login and authentication across the web service. Here we utilised 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.

Following the project, the rejection rate of data and submissions dropped dramatically. There has also been a decrease in transaction times. Helping to increased efficiency in this area of the Care Quality Commission.

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)

“Beyond their technical expertise and professionalism, Axis12’s unique selling point is their personal approach to service and their commitment to flexibility and accommodation of our needs, even at short notice. Axis12’s Drupal expertise and intelligent solutions make them easy to work with and a safe pair of hands.

We’ve been impressed with Axis12’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, Axis12 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 Axis12 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 Axis12 on our ongoing projects, and would recommend them to any organisation embarking on a similar journey."

- Caroline Milton, Head of Public Digital Services

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