GDS Transformers
Yeo Yong Kiat | Meet the 14 techies who are ambitiously pursuing digital greenfields across the Singapore public service, starting with the healthcare sector. Read our story, and how we came to be.
Government Digital Services (GDS) was one of the first engineering divisions set up within GovTech to lean forward and assist government agencies with their digitalisation woes.
Being in GDS has taught me much about innovation and gumption, about how we should dare to lead things grounds-up. As the curtains draw on my second year at GovTech, it is my privilege to cast a spotlight on this group of 14 techies, and how the innovation culture in GDS has sponsored their spirit.
This is an acknowledgement of gratitude to GDS as much as it is a product team showcase. We celebrate how the team came to be, and how GDS allowed the team to come to be - because in GDS, people matter more than tech.
We met in the GDS grants portal team. It was poetic, since grants portals represented GDS’ first ambitious foray into the government digital space.
It was 2017 when GDS first launched its flagship whole-of-government Business Grants Portal (BGP). It was an ambitious product that sought to harmonise grant policies onto a single platform for cost savings.
As if by fate, I was seconded to the GovTech grants portal office. I met the OurSG Grants Portal (OSG) team, who had a wealth of experience working with MOH and the Agency for Integrated Care for healthcare grants; and the SafeEntry team, who had joined BGP after an arduous year of COVID-19 development work. Somehow, we were all brought together under a joint vision of re-engineering grant portal architecture.
While grant portals were our day jobs, our teams would knock on the doors of healthcare time and again throughout 2023. Alex tried to bring SafeEntry back as a peacetime product for hospitals and advocated for decentralised healthcare credentials, while Hoon Ling doggedly pursued a blood donation tracker with the Health Sciences Authority. We clearly knew that there were good problems for our teams to solve in healthcare.
Our first business opportunity came in the form of Kaki, a personal app that allows residents to generate summaries and insights tailored to the care documents and profiles stored within.
We found faith with the National Healthcare Group (NHG) in June 2023. GDS had previously partnered NHG to launch HealthCerts for the verification and issuance of COVID-19 vaccine certificates. They were now looking to resolve the fragmented info-flow between the hundreds of socio-healthcare providers in Singapore. Rather than the traditional and expensive solution of having a single centralised IT system, they wanted us to re-position residents as the ultimate custodians of their own care journeys across the socio-healthcare spectrum.
The team embarked on a meticulous exploration. Tapping on their experience with OSG, our UXDs Shaina and Lay Hui spearheaded a 3-month discovery workshop, delving deep into intricacies with community partners, medical practitioners, social workers, and residents themselves. They uncovered a mosaic of needs - from bridging communication gaps between care providers to distilling complex care documents into actionable insights for residents. Fuelled by a vision to make a difference, Eileen, Nicholas, and Yi Ning developed a prototype that brought the team’s ideas to life.
April 2024 will mark a pivotal moment as we present Kaki at the Digital Community of Care platform, before the representatives of all three healthcare clusters. The team hopes to also partner MSF and SGEnable to extend this empowerment to persons with disabilities and caregivers, ensuring that Kaki becomes a cornerstone of support for every segment of our community.
The purported end of my secondment brought us our second innovation opportunity, ironically. Sense is an AI data assistant that allows policy officers to translate natural language into SQL queries.
As I prepared to return to MOH after a 2-year secondment, I took up a policy workstream in Healthcare Finance. The task was simple - to calculate a series of budget figures required for implementation of HealthierSG. However, it was a nightmare for any policy officer to even begin this calculation.
Without technical knowledge of SQL, policy officers had to coordinate their data analysis requests between data engineers and data technicians. What could have been achieved in a single day was stretched out to a painful 2 months. Policy officers had to explain their policies to technicians, technicians had to clarify endlessly, and endless data approvals and preparation had to be done. Worst of all, the calculations had to be written in a secure laboratory under CCTV monitoring, without internet!
In quite a foolhardy move, Aniruddha and I decided to experience this pain for ourselves and volunteered as the policy-technician pair for this workstream. In true engineering fashion, we conceptualised a Large Language Model solution, to empower policy officers to make these SQL queries directly on the databases themselves, without any intermediaries.
What finally secured us the opportunity was not technical prowess, but the team’s strong bias for action. Within a single week of submitting the calculations, we spun up a working prototype for demonstration to MOH Senior Management.
And the rest is history - the team is now working closely with MOH to implement Sense on the National Platform for Healthcare Claims in April 2024. Beyond the commitment to MOH, they are also looking to partner many other government agencies as well.
We are taking a step of faith in 2024. The team is looking to harvest problem statements in healthcare, and scale up these products across the public service.
As if living on borrowed time, I am asking to have my time at GovTech extended for one more year, to venture into greenfield areas with the team. As the entire team transits responsibly from their current projects, we are hoping to find our third and fourth (and even more) opportunities in healthcare, and eventually scaling up solutions across the public service. We are also bringing along our private sector partners with us, in keeping with the spirit that augmented resources are as much of an engineering asset as our own GovTechies.
The culture of innovation and dare, so carefully nurtured by GDS officers and the various tribe leads, has planted a seed in us. We look forward to creating more delightful products, so keep an eye out for these 14 GovTechies and their product pitches in 2024!