How COVID-19 is kickstarting change in the public sector

1. Speeding up grant awards through process automation

Work­ing with IT ser­vices com­pa­ny Atos, Sport Eng­land intro­duced a full bespoke dig­i­tal process for man­ag­ing emer­gency grant assess­ments. This pub­lic sec­tor dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion solu­tion meant it could man­age the influx of appli­ca­tions from sports clubs in finan­cial dis­tress due to the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic and become the first Nation­al Lot­tery-fund­ed organ­i­sa­tion to start dis­trib­ut­ing grants.

In just 37 days, Sport Eng­land processed 11,044 appli­ca­tions for mon­ey from its emer­gency fund, mak­ing 7,500 emer­gency sup­port awards to clubs and grass­roots groups totalling £27.5 mil­lion.

“In response to the urgency of the sit­u­a­tion, we quick­ly rolled out a dig­i­tal process devel­oped by Atos that enabled us to process appli­ca­tions far more quick­ly than would have been pos­si­ble under a ‘busi­ness as usu­al’ sce­nario,” says Mike Dia­per, exec­u­tive direc­tor at Sport Eng­land.

“COVID-19 has pre­sent­ed new chal­lenges for all parts of the econ­o­my with swift mobil­i­sa­tion required to respond to the new con­di­tions that we have all been oper­at­ing under. This new dig­i­tal approach allowed us to allo­cate grants to asses­sors and deploy automa­tion for review of com­plet­ed assess­ments and gen­er­a­tion of awards.”

2. Protecting medics and patients with mixed-reality headsets

COVID-dri­ven pub­lic sec­tor dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion can be seen in action on the NHS front­line. Staff at Impe­r­i­al Col­lege Health­care NHS Trust are wear­ing Microsoft HoloLens head­sets while work­ing in high-risk areas at some of London’s busiest hos­pi­tals.

Using Microsoft Teams and remote assist tech­nol­o­gy, secure live video is fed to a com­put­er screen in a near­by room so health­care teams can see every­thing the doc­tor treat­ing COVID-19 patients can see, while remain­ing at a safe dis­tance. Impe­r­i­al says HoloLens has deliv­ered a fall of up to 83 per cent in the time staff spend in high-risk areas, while also sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduc­ing the use of per­son­al pro­tec­tive equip­ment.

Rather than putting users in a ful­ly com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed world, like vir­tu­al real­i­ty, HoloLens allows them to place 3D dig­i­tal mod­els in the room along­side them and inter­act with them using ges­tures, gaze and voice. Doc­tors wear­ing the head­sets can hold hands-free video calls with col­leagues and experts any­where in the world. Med­ical notes and X‑rays can also be placed along­side the call in the wearer’s field of view, all while inter­act­ing with patients.

3. Digital service for the vulnerable

Uni­tary author­i­ty Buck­ing­hamshire Coun­cil only offi­cial­ly came into being dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, on April 1. An oper­a­tional redesign for its cre­ation con­nect­ed IT, human resources and finan­cial ser­vices via ServiceNow’s cloud-based plat­form.

COVID-19 kick­start­ed pub­lic sec­tor dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion to pro­tect vul­ner­a­ble cit­i­zens asked to shield and sup­port them with new, crit­i­cal ser­vices.

Ser­vi­ceNow part­ner Unifii and Buckinghamshire’s IT team inte­grat­ed Ser­vi­ceNow and the council’s online cus­tomer ser­vice sys­tem, going from six data fields in a spread­sheet to 90-plus fields of essen­tial infor­ma­tion man­aged and updat­ed in real time.

This solved real-world prob­lems caused by the pan­dem­ic, such as co-ordi­nat­ing food parcels, deliv­er­ing med­i­cines and pro­vid­ing prac­ti­cal sup­port, includ­ing dog-walk­ing and arrang­ing friend­ship calls for those in iso­la­tion. The plat­form is used for every­thing from order­ing per­son­al pro­tec­tive equip­ment to check­ing whether a vul­ner­a­ble per­son has enough food or a patient’s pre­scrip­tion has been col­lect­ed.

“We have an accu­rate, sin­gle source of truth for all the data we are col­lect­ing, with real-time dash­boards, which means no vul­ner­a­ble per­son should ever be over­looked,” says Tony Ellis, ser­vice direc­tor of ICT at Buck­ing­hamshire Coun­cil.

4. Employees take a digital transformation journey

By deliv­er­ing in five days an IT project that should have tak­en eight weeks, HM Rev­enue & Cus­toms (HMRC) piv­ot­ed from being large­ly office based to sup­port­ing upwards of 50,000 employ­ees con­nect­ed remote­ly. HMRC built a new remote access work­ing plat­form able to han­dle much greater num­bers. But as lock­down loomed it faced the chal­lenge of rapid­ly pack­ag­ing, test­ing and deploy­ing soft­ware to more than 60,000 devices.

We quick­ly rolled out a dig­i­tal process that enabled us to process appli­ca­tions far more quick­ly than would have been pos­si­ble under a ‘busi­ness as usu­al’ sce­nario

Once the soft­ware was released, it took less than 48 hours to get the major­i­ty of HMRC employ­ees con­nect­ed from home, with IT part­ners also able to access the new plat­form. The result was a ser­vice that has run with almost no inter­rup­tion. With­out it, HMRC employ­ees could not have worked from kitchen tables and spare bed­rooms to deliv­er the Chan­cel­lor Rishi Sunak’s COVID-19 relief pack­ages.

“We worked round the clock and the team was incred­i­bly focused on get­ting the job done, rewrit­ing parts of our approach to deliv­er change as we went,” says HMRC head of enter­prise plat­form ser­vices Mau­rice Mattholie. “We’ve enabled new ways of work­ing for our employ­ees and are con­sol­i­dat­ing what we’ve learnt about how the organ­i­sa­tion has adapt­ed to change. It’s a big oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­tin­ue to improve our ways of work­ing.”

5. Assessing a wave of care innovation

The NHSX unit brings togeth­er teams from the Depart­ment of Health and Social Care, NHS Eng­land and NHS Improve­ment to dri­ve the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion of care. In response to the COVID-19 cri­sis, it launched Techforce19, a com­pe­ti­tion call­ing for inno­va­tions to sup­port the elder­ly, vul­ner­a­ble and self-iso­lat­ing dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, offer­ing gov­ern­ment fund­ing of up to £25,000 to put poten­tial solu­tions to the test.

Between March 23 and April 3, the chal­lenge received more than 1,600 appli­ca­tions. On April 24, NHSX announced it had whit­tled these down to 18 pub­lic sec­tor dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion solu­tions to be assessed more thor­ough­ly.

Among the solu­tions NHSX is look­ing at are Vir­ti, which cou­ples vir­tu­al and aug­ment­ed real­i­ty with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to deliv­er train­ing and patient edu­ca­tion; Sim­ply Do, a vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty for self-iso­lat­ing med­ical pro­fes­sion­als, designed to har­ness their exper­tise as a think tank in the fight against COVID-19; Apari­to, focused pri­mar­i­ly on patients with rare dis­eases, which uses remote-mon­i­tor­ing tech­nol­o­gy to gath­er patient-gen­er­at­ed data out­side hos­pi­tal via videos, wear­able tech­nol­o­gy, pho­tos and text; and Fee­bris, an app to help iden­ti­fy health risks and dete­ri­o­ra­tion among the elder­ly.