In 2017, upwards of 60,000 Amsterdam residents made use of one or more social support services. Total annual expenditure on the social domain is around €18 billion. Data and insight have already been built up for individual domains such as Youth Services, Education and Health & Fitness. However, an integrated picture of service use and client flows within the separate columns is currently lacking. As a result, the effectiveness of integrated policy within the social domain remains unclear. Ahti has developed a Health Dashboard, which is the starting point for the Social Domain Insight & Control Project for the Social Cluster of the City of Amsterdam. Ahti built the dashboard, populated it with data and performed the analyses needed to enable questions arising from the policy to be answered. The project aims to provide better, integrated insight into service use and client flows in the Amsterdam social domain. The project was handed over to the City in 2019.

Gaining insight into the use of social support services

In 2017, upwards of 60,000 Amsterdam residents made use of one or more social support services. Total annual expenditure on the social domain is around €18 billion. Because interrelationships between the various branches of the social domain remain unclear, the extent to which investment in one branch affects another is also uncertain. The production data on the use of services is recorded very efficiently using separate core applications and saved in the Social Cluster data warehouse environments. The only problem is that the data is not centrally available for integrated analysis and research. That is due to the various technical and organisational obstacles, as well as potential legal and privacy restrictions with regard to entitlement to use the data (purpose limitation, privacy). Those obstacles are hindering transition to more data- or information-driven policy development in the Amsterdam social domain. The Social Domain Insight & Control Project aims to provide better, integrated insight into service use and client flows in the Amsterdam social domain.

Analysis and visualisation of data on the Insight & Control Dashboard

An ahti data researcher is assigned to the data analysis scrum team. The team is concerned with analysis of the data, set-up of the associated analysis environments and visualisation of the results. Ahti builds and maintains the Insight & Control Dashboard on which all services (numbers, percentages, costs) in all the social domains are visualised – by area, household type, target group, etc. Working alongside other researchers from OIS (Research, Information and Statistics), ahti also analyses the linked data to enable questions arising from the policy to be answered. So, for example, insights into service accumulation can be enriched with consumption cost data.

Status of the Social Domain Insight & Control Project

The project was started in 2018 and completed in early 2019. Ahti has completed the data analysis, built the Insight & Control Dashboard and handed it over to the Social Domain of the City of Amsterdam.

Partners

• Research, Information and Statistics (OIS) of the City of Amsterdam, Social Domain (Youth Services; Care Services; Work, Participation & Income)
• Amsterdam Municipal Health Service

Contact

More information or do you have a question? Please contact Rachel van Beem (Head of Projects).