Photo Credit: Silver Generation Office, Agency for Integrated Care​

The Senior Engagement Application (SEA) is a volunteer management and data collection system. It was created and developed by the Silver Generation Office (SGO), together with GovTech and Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS). SGO reaches out to seniors to share more about government policies and schemes and connect them to programmes and services. Through personalised engagements conducted at seniors’ homes, workplaces and community nodes by Silver Generation (SG) Ambassadors, SGO supports seniors in ageing actively, healthily and independently.

The Opportunity

Before SEA was developed, SG Ambassadors used hardcopy forms to record data on seniors and their needs. These forms were then routed to SGO staff for checks and follow-up actions. Traditionally, this process took up to three days. With a rapidly ageing population and a limited pool of about 3,000 volunteers, SGO needed to leverage technology to improve its operational efficiency.

The Solution

1. The challenges SGO faced led to the ideation and development of the SEA. The application replaced the use of hardcopy forms with digital inputs stored in tablets. Without the need for tedious hardcopy data collection, productivity could be improved.

2. To build the SEA, IHiS had to digitise more than 120 data fields in the hardcopy Post Engagement form (PEF) to increase flexibility in crossreferencing and matching data online. The digitalisation of the data recording resulted in time-savings of about one hour per engagement. With the profile of seniors captured in the system, SG Ambassadors are better equipped to sense needs and trigger recommendations, e.g. befriending services for seniors who live alone.

3. With SEA, SGO staff are able to observe engagement progress in real-time, allowing for quicker adjustments to be made to deployments if the need arises. SG Ambassadors are thus updated remotely on new or revised deployments through SEA.

4. The digitalisation has improved operational processes as it is now accessed and tracked within a single system. This has led to up to 50 per cent of time saved for SGO’s staff as they no longer have to consolidate and print hardcopy summary sheets comprising deployment details, nor spend time cross-checking the hardcopy forms against online entries.

 

Photo Credit: Silver Generation Office, Agency for Integrated Care​

At a Glance: AIC Senior Engagement Application

Here is a closer look at how AIC and IHiS used IT to transform the workflow and processes to support SGO’s purpose of outreach to seniors:

Since April 2019, with the use of SEA’s digital capabilities, SGO has reached 45 per cent of 500,000 Merdeka Generation Singaporeans.