Business Architecture

Owned by Toby Page
Jul 16, 2021
2 min read

The health and wellbeing strategy for Leeds aims to support people to stay healthy and well, help those with a long term health condition self-manage their health and, for those that need a care intervention, to receive that care closer to their home. Much of this requires that the people of Leeds can access accurate and validated information about services. Providing quality information to citizens is a core element of the city’s digital commitments, as shared with the Health and Wellbeing Board.

However, the reality is that within the Leeds health economy there are several hundred websites providing health and care information. This ranges from leaflets, to directories containing a range of statutory, voluntary, community and social enterprise-led services. There is currently no single website providing a comprehensive, trusted or accurate level of information. Major directories and smaller websites collect data and manage it in their own databases and in isolation from each other.  This fragmented provision results in significant data gaps, duplication and inaccuracies; impacting both the people of Leeds and those trying to support them.  

Leeds Open Online Platform (LOOP) addresses the current issues associated with data silos, limited or no data standards, inconsistent quality assurance and limited sharing of service data by providing an open data service that allows key directories, websites and applications in Leeds to take a feed from a single, accurate and trusted source. In practice this means providing a single database, which aggregates and validates data that can then be extracted and fed through to websites and third-party applications such as Person Held Record.  

Based on the drivers outlined above, a number of business requirements were identified.    Supporting information for the discovery work to inform these is available in the LOOP project directories.

The principal business processes to realise desired benefits are aligned to:

  • Management of LOOP content by curators and organisations via the administration portal

  • Consumption of LOOP content and presentation via consumer websites (either via CMS plugin, web widget or API integration)

The following Application Architecture section describes how these high level processes are met by the LOOP platform.