Supporting the accuracy and completeness of records by presenting one golden view of an individual or address.
A successful data matching service for Covid19 Track and Trace, Electoral Register data collection and more
Summary
The QES Data Matching Service offers local authorities an efficient method of ensuring the accuracy and completeness of their data records for a range of uses including collecting electoral data, supporting the Covid19 Track and Trace service and many more. Local authorities securely provide us with numerous data from council data sources, such as housing, social care, council tax, land register, education services and any other appropriate data sets held. All this data is processed, cleansed, and matched through our Data Matching Service to ultimately provide one holistic, golden view of an individual and their contact information. QES will return a golden view of an individual, with all information known to them by multiple data sources across the council, providing a comprehensive view of an individual and their contact information.
By using QES’ Data Matching Service, councils will have sufficient data on an individual and household, and therefore will no longer require the need for the manual information gathering and chasing, saving sufficient time and resources which can be focused on other aspects of the organisation.
If using the QES Data Matching Service for Covid19 Track and Trace requirements, this data matching will support the national effort for a coherent and accurate track & trace service, which will ultimately lead to a more targeted approach to saving lives, and more effective management of this pandemic. If used for supporting your electoral register data collection, it will help identify individuals where a change of address has been recorded through other data sources (e.g. council tax records). This will then give your team the ability to improve the completeness and accuracy of the local authority’s electoral data via electronic means.
This Data Matching Service has been proven to be successful amongst various councils across England for different types of data matching, e.g. for Council Tax, Fraud Prevention, etc. Islington Council are currently setting up this project with QES, and through their experience with the system and their testing, they anticipate at least an 80% match rate.
How it works
QES Project Management team and your allocated Data consultant will work with you to decide what data sources you will be matching against, and to ensure they are in the correct format for matching. Please note, the quality of the matching output can only be as good as the data fed into it, so it is important to ensure a high quality of data sources from the offset.
As a minimum, QES require forename, surname, address and date of birth within the data sources. However, if more unique data can be provided on an individual then the more sophisticated the matching and the more effective the service will be e.g. council tax ID, UPN, NHS number, etc.
Data sources will then be securely transferred by the council to QES, who will input the data into our data matching tool. This will then automatically run through our global matching tasks for person, family and address. The system will process and match the data records based on the pre-determined rules created by QES, and our existing user group. With over 200 rules programmed in the system, and with proven success in matching data for councils across England, the accuracy of the output is extremely high.
Each data record is matched against every rule in the system, which is an algorithm assessing and determining the likelihood of a match against the original data source. For example, one rule may be: first initial + surname + council tax record + first part of postcode = suggested match. The system will run through over 200 of these to ultimately provide the data with confirmed and suggested matches.
Once the data has been processed and matched by QES, the raw data generated will be returned to the council for service usage. This raw data will provide a golden, holistic view of the council’s data records across the data sources provided, demonstrating improved completeness and accuracy of data for supporting you, whether it be for your electoral register, Covid19 Track and Trace or many other services or processes.
