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Mytime Active started managing leisure services for Bromley Council in 2004. Since then, through a combination of business acumen, best practice and community ethos, they have enjoyed rapid growth. They now turnover around £33m and deliver an array of leisure, golf and health services for local authorities and primary care trusts across the UK; and as a social enterprise and charity, every penny of surplus they make goes back into the organisation for reinvestment into their local communities which to date is just over £16m.
Mytime Active works with Primary Care Trusts (PCTs), GPs and other health clinicians to reduce health inequalities in their local communities. With over 15 years of experience and as a fully accredited Care Quality Commission(CQC) service, they do this by providing various preventative and treatment programmes including child/adult weight management, exercise referrals, health checks, help with long-term conditions, health trainers, smoking cessation, cardiac rehabilitation, vascular intervention and prevention, and consultancy.
Mytime Active is focused on delivering an integrated service approach to meet individual needs in the community and provide evidence-based outcomes. This enables them to provide quality services that are effective, have successful take-up, and offer excellent value of service to commissioners.
Mytime Active faced a significant information management and reporting challenge. As they had grown to work with multiple commissioners across the UK, delivering many highly tailored programmes to many thousands of clients, their current approach of utilising paper-based systems, spreadsheets and a collection of Access databases was no longer sufficient.
Mytime Active was looking for a complete information management system that not only addressed the challenges that they currently faced, but also support their aim to continually improve the quality of service they provide and support them in their growth. Key requirements included:
- Harmonisation of Data – providing a single unified system that could be used across multiple commissioners, programmes, activities and clients
- Completeness & Accuracy – taking away the burden of capturing information, ensuring that data is accurate at source and providing the flexibility to tailor the information specifically for each community
- Process Efficiency – using the data and information management to streamline processes and support staff in the delivery of programmes and the personal management of their clients
- Evidence & Insight – providing the level of reporting desired to truly evidence the outcomes of the programmes being run and to gain valuable insight into what is working well and what needs refining
One Beyond has and continues to be the ideal partner for us. They have worked very closely with us to deliver a solution that has added significant value to our business and provided us with a platform to support our future growth. I would whole-heartedly recommend them.
Selection
Given the unique nature of their business, Mytime Active knew that there was no standard packaged application that would meet their needs. Given that their requirements were highly complex and with an ambition to put in place a solution within three months – they recognised that selecting the right partner was critical. They approached a number of bespoke software companies, one of which was One Beyond.
“We instinctively knew that One Beyond was the right partner for us”, said Annie Holden, Mytime Active Division Manager. “They had a very honest and realistic approach and they invested the time to precisely understand our business and what we were trying to achieve. They proposed, what I felt was needed, when we needed it.”
Solution
A web application utilising Microsoft SQL Server that provides a comprehensive information management system with flexible reporting to support the management, administration and execution of the business.
The solution had to take into account how each and every stakeholder worked and fully support them in their role. The solution also needed to deliver ultimate flexibility, not only to cater for the wide range of services that Mytime Active currently provided, but also to cater for future new projects from different commissioners.
One Beyond spent time with Mytime Active managers gaining a helicopter view of the business and solution objectives. But as importantly, they spent considerable time with managers, administrators and people delivering activities to clients.
Captured requirements were played back in the form of a series of prototypes that were invaluable in enabling Mytime Active to both visualise and validate the proposed solution and refine the final product.
“Vital to this project was architecting a database design that was not only robust, but was extremely flexible” said Nick Thompson, CEO, One Beyond. “We built flexibility in from day one enabling Mytime Active to not only select core data elements for each programme, activity and client, but for users to be able to add new fields, define drop-down boxes, create new forms and generate custom-reports as required.”
The solution, created as a .NET web application utilising Microsoft SQL Server is delivered by One Beyond as a fully hosted and managed service, providing Mytime Active with the complete end-to-end service delivery that they required.
Mytime Active now has a comprehensive information management system that supports the management, administration and execution of their business. It enables clients to be managed on an individual basis with the ability for the deliverers of programmes to update information, produce standard letters and forms and to schedule sessions.
It enables programme managers to fully understand every session, its effectiveness and provide comprehensive evidence to commissioners. And, it also enables Information Governance and allows the management team at Mytime Active to gain a holistic insight into their operation with the provision of a fully automated and flexible reporting system.
Outcome
Delivered within the three month timeline and to budget, the solution provided by One Beyond is now fully operational within Mytime Active and delivering significant value to the business.
“Our users love it”, said Annie Holden, Mytime Active Division Manager. “They have a single system that fully supports the work they do. They are able to take responsibility for the data relating to their clients, save time by using standard forms and letters, and work more efficiently by utilising the process automation the system provides them.”
“Our commissioners, including many PCTs, are focused on information governance and the ability to evidence the outcome of the programmes we run for them.” continued Annie. “They think that our solution is excellent. Some think the range and detail of data we are able to provide them is really remarkable.
As a management team within Mytime Active we are delighted with what One Beyond has produced for us; they have exceeded our expectations. We now have confidence in knowing we have one accurate and complete source of data, we have the ability to quickly and accurately produce reports for our commissioners, and we have dashboards that enable us to track contract based KPIs to monitor our performance and to quickly identify and address any areas where we are not performing as well as we would like.”
“One Beyond has and continues to be the ideal partner for us. They have worked very closely with us to deliver a solution that has added significant value to our business and provided us with a platform to support our future growth. I would wholeheartedly recommend them.”
