Process change driving force behind OGP’s Bright product success

In her book Recoding America, the former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer and US Digital Service’s co-founder, Jennifer Pahlka, observes: “If we want services that scale to meet people's needs, it's not just a matter of building new technology... It's a matter of clearing out the clutter it rests upon”.  

Pahlka points to the need for a solid foundation of well-designed processes and systems to build technology solutions for effective public services.  

Her point comes to mind when I was speaking to Singapore’s Open Government Products (OGP) Senior Product Manager, Charmaine Lee, and Senior Product Designer, Pearly Ong, on their recently launched product called Bright.  

Bright is a referral platform for intermediate to long-term care services, and aims to reduce the current referral time of three to eight weeks. 

Bright aims to replace a legacy platform used by the Agency for Integrated Care (AIC) for more than a decade by AIC staff, public healthcare institutions and community care providers. 

“Most of the changes on Bright start with a process change. Then Bright just enables it. Without changing processes, you’ll be just trying to patch gaps,” says Lee to GovInsider. 

Bright is being launched in phases since this January to slowly replace AIC’s Integrated Referral Management System (IRMS).  

According to Ong, the partnership between OGP and AIC on Bright follows the success observed through positive feedback garnered for another digital product known as Care360, also built by OGP. 

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Reevaluating processes based on evolving needs 

Recognising a growing ageing population, there is a critical need to develop a more robust system for intermediate and long-term care referrals to meet future needs, says Ong.  

One of the process changes involves shifting from a self-selection model to an assignment model.

What this means is that AIC will assign the cases instead of having service providers select cases themselves. 

Previously with the self-selection model, service providers had limited information access due to confidentiality which leads to delays in uptake, she notes. 

To address these issues, Bright will now route the referrals to AIC officers to make the initial referral assignments.  

AIC officers have comprehensive patient information to match cases to appropriate providers, says Lee, while service providers can still reassess and decide whether to accept the cases. 

As the national agency responsible for coordinating and developing community care services, AIC could also then more effectively match patients with available capacity across the country.  

Bringing IT and business users together 

The team learnt that business and IT users may be unfamiliar with each other’s requirements and processes. 

This is why it was key for the team to bring these users together to collaboratively address the technical complexities and business requirements. 

Another significant challenge while implementing Bright was that the platform needs to integrate with ten other systems. The team had to make sure that changes made to Bright did not negatively impact downstream systems, such as the case management platform, Lee explains. 

Given the unique requirements of each user, the team had to engage extensively with the users to understand their unique requirements. 

User experience highlights 

Ong and Lee share more about the key feature highlights that were informed by the team’s user engagement and research.  

One of them is reducing the number of required fields on the form from up to 200 fields to 120.

Ong shares that this requires extensive aligning across various stakeholders to ensure everyone agrees to the reduced data requirements. 

Another one is making it possible to edit submitted referrals where previously, forms were locked once submitted. “For long-term care patients, their health conditions often change quite rapidly,” she explains. 

While the previous IRMS platform allowed users to add separate addendums, this created a fragmented review process as users had to piece together information from the original referral and the addendums.  

Both of them also share about removing the restricted access given to different users to expedite the referral process. Crucially, the platform keeps an audit trail by tracking every edit, including who made it.  

Previously, medical information could only be completed by doctors and nursing procedures by nurses, and vice versa.  

“Usually, the medical social workers coordinate [the referral process for] each case, [and] they can now do so immediately on the spot without having to wait for someone else,” says Lee. 

Next, empowering the patient 

Moving forward, the team hopes to explore the potential to empower citizens with self-service options for accessing care services.  

“For Bright specifically, our long-term plan is to make the referral process more transparent for citizens,” says Lee. 

Given the rising ageing population and demand for long-term care services, empowering citizens could alleviate the pressures on the healthcare system, she adds. 

“Even within OGP, we see a lot of opportunities for the healthcare, social and community care sectors to better collaborate. As an organisation, this is something we will explore further as well. 

“Can we make information flow smoothly between these different sectors, such that the ultimate goal is to improve patient outcomes?” she adds.