Our original plan, when we started Inside Outcomes, was to change the way that organisations and commissioners use outcomes. Our plan was to promote the need to take a whole person approach to clients and to directly relate the things that happen in services to National Outcome Frameworks. We think this approach improves integration of services, around the individual, and means that commissioners can be more accountable for the things they commission. We managed to achieve all of this through our collection of Risk Maps, these maps explicitly link the most common issues with National Outcomes Frameworks in an easy to use format.

The one thing we’d not really intended to do was become software vendors. We needed software to make our system work and having our Risk Tracker system has helped many organisations to quickly demonstrate their impact. In the end we created a client management system that is simple to use yet extremely powerful in demonstrating impact. At this point we think we need to differentiate ourselves from other companies selling client management software, because we think changing the way organisations relate to outcomes is more important than software.

That’s why we’re giving our software away for free. More than that, we’re releasing our software under an open source license. This means that anyone can take our Risk Tracker system and run it themselves. They can also adapt it in anyway they want, they can even resell it if they want. Any other software manufacturers can take any element of our software and incorporate it into their products.

We are doing this because we think measurement against National Outcomes Frameworks should be the standard in preventative services and there shouldn’t be any barriers for small or large agencies because of things like intellectual property. One of the questions we’ve been most frequently asked, since we created Risk Tracker, is “how does it integrate with other systems?”. Whilst there is a stand off between software manufacturers to protect their products, integration is unlikely to progress. We hope that giving away the code for our system will be a step towards integrating a common system of outcome measurement across services.

We will continue to offer hosted solutions to organisations that don’t want the responsibility for managing servers. We will also continue to improve Risk Tracker as we work with different organisations that give us new ideas. In the near future we hope to have more products the use the same system of Risk Maps and we also intend to make those available under an open source license.

If you would like to take Risk Tracker to use you can get it from our Github repository.

As always we would be pleased to talk to anyone about how they can use our system in the future or how we can support better outcome measurement.