ALISS – 15 years of coproducing a national digital service 

Chris Mackie, Director of Digital, looks back at how ALISS has developed, grown, and innovated over time.

ALISS (A Local Information System for Scotland) is a national digital programme enabling people to find and share information on local and national health and wellbeing resources, services, groups, and activities. Since its inception, ALISS has championed an innovative combination of the following approaches: 

• Open-source code, which is freely available for those developing similar systems 
• Open data, which is publicly accessible to be presented on other websites 
• Agile approaches, facilitating iterative improvements based on feedback 
• Crowdsourcing, enabling anyone in Scotland to contribute to ALISS 
• Co-production, enacting human-centred design, putting users at the centre of developments  

Over time, ALISS has evolved in response to the changing health and social care environment and currently hosts over 8,800 entries. 

The foundations of ALISS

Starting life in January 2009 as ‘Access to Local Information to Support Self Management’, ALISS was initially managed by the Scottish Government. It was the vision of Derek Hoy, a noted Scottish nursing informatician passed away in 2012. The programme aimed to support the self management of long-term conditions by improving access to information about local services. In 2011, ALISS was transferred to the ALLIANCE. Its early years are documented in two ALLIANCE reports, “Access to Local Information to Support Self Management, 2009-2013” and “A Local Information System for Scotland, 2013 – 2016“.
 

From reasearch to action

In 2019, the ALLIANCE commissioned research into the possible futures of ALISS.  The conclusions were that three broad areas needed to be addressed:

• Building foundations 
  This highlighted immediate improvements required, including: upgrading the hosting platform, improving usability, introducing data quality processes and the provision of online video training for users. 
• Linking the landscape 
  This sought to make sense of the crowded directory landscape in Scotland.  This led to the exploration of data aggregation from these directories. 
• Engaging the citizen 
  This area suggested ways in which ALISS could be more personalised in its approach to providing information to users.  This included ideas like chatbots, voice activation and personalisation of search results. 

In 2021, the ALLIANCE published a new strategy for ALISS, identifying four priority areas:

• More data
• Better data
• Better experience
• More users

Following a review of the ALISS strategy in 2025, a fifth strategic objective – better insights – was added. 

Building on the 2019 research and the ALISS strategy, ALISS and partners successfully applied to Innovate UK for funding for the ‘Democratising Access to Community Services’ (DACS) project. The project commenced in August 2022, and saw several developments throughout 2023 and 2024, including: 

• The development of an Alexa app. 
• The integration of ALISS data into the Elemental social prescribing system. 
• Enhancement of the ALISS claims process. 
• Improvements to the data input process, including additional fields for services’ accessibility features and audiences. 
• The addition of a data governance system, prompting users to review and update their ALISS entries. 

Recent achievements and looking ahead

In 2025, ALISS delivered on the ‘better insights’ objective by launching a publicly available Analytics dashboard. Feedback from stakeholders indicates that the dashboard has already been influential in Scottish Government policy development. That same year, the ‘Our Health, Our Place, Our Voice’ toolkit for young people was relaunched. 

In 2026, ALISS relaunched its Asset Mapping toolkit, helping people work together to find, collect and share information about local resources. The team are also preparing to integrate ALISS data into the forthcoming ‘Digital Front Door’ for health and social care in Scotland – publicly known as MyCare.scot. This integration promises an exciting opportunity for ALISS to be part of an innovative and powerful platform to improve the whole population’s health and wellbeing. 

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