The issues that hold you back

How Sentinel's solution will help

It’s hard to pull together vital information on families when you’re dealing with so many different data sources.

Our solution automatically collects information from any structured data source, including your own systems, standalone databases and those of partner agencies such as the police, NHS, DWP and housing associations and collates it in one central place.

Producing the MHCLG Returns is a manual and time consuming task, with a high risk of errors.

The Sentinel Troubled Family solution provides an automated answer to all of your MHCLG return requirements. With a simple click of a button you can produce a detailed NIS costing report, the Family Progress Data (FPD) return and PBR claim. All such outputs can be viewed on screen and then downloaded locally to be sent on at your convenience. 

The quality and accuracy of the data we work with varies significantly.

Our solution enables you to set your own configurable rules for validating, profiling and cleansing incoming information while also identifying poor data sources. The information collected in the Think Family Hub becomes the most complete and quality-controlled data available.

Merging data together is very hard. It is a manual process involving many iterations of spreadsheet or database functions.

Merging is also controlled by configurable rules within the Hub. These can be set up to automatically carry out merges where there is a confident match. Alternatively, the system can be used to identify potential merges, even where there is misspelling, mistyping or deliberate attempts to deceive. You can review the proposals and decide whether to accept or reject the merge. The Hub will remember your merging decision for future processing so you do not need to review each time.
In addition, the Hub will learn from local information you add. Providing information on known twins, common names and common addresses (such as hostels and temporary B&B accommodation) can be used by the Hub to assess the confidence on potential merges to help you decide.

It is not easy to build up a reliable audit trail of why we have merged records.

All our solutions are built on a ‘Data Protection by Design’ approach. This means that there is a full audit trail available for every merge or proposed merge carried out within the Hub.

There is always a high risk of errors due to the manual nature of our processes, so we spend a lot of time trying to check our results.

After spending some valuable time with us during the implementation project to set up, test and tweak the various rules (we provide a standard set to get you started), you know what rules exist and what results to expect. With these in place you have a consistent and robust set of decisions that will be applied automatically to every new record.

Once we have merged and checked our data, we still need to run reports to identify the people that meet different criteria and roll this up into family units.

Individual records are merged together to form a single holistic view for each family member and then linked together to create family units. This is done automatically each night, or every time you receive new data.
As a result, our solution has all the key information available across the family and can compare this against the threshold criteria that you set. The results of this comparison are presented to you each morning, giving your team an up-to-date list of all the families that have crossed the threshold.

Every time we need to update our information, we have to repeat the same manual steps. Because this takes so much effort, we can’t do it regularly.

Our solution removes the manual effort required to collect, analyse and merge people and family information. Instead, it is all done automatically, based on the business rules you’ve defined.

Our merging processes are focused on trying to bring people’s data together, but we cannot always capture the outcomes for all our families for PBR claims or understand which types of intervention / support activities are proving most successful.
 

Our solution can collect and combine any information you want to include, for example all key events and outcomes from front line systems and data collected directly via on-line forms, to build up a full chronology of activities against a family. To support PBR claims you can also see exactly what support a family has received and the outcomes achieved. Finally, you can report on outcomes against the various activity types to review effectiveness across your Troubled Families programme.

Related downloads 

Think Family Data Hub flyer.pdf