Streamlining govt e-services, expanding digital MC scheme among Smart Nation efforts unveiled
Singapore
A SINGLE touchpoint for common government services and expanded use of digital Medical Certificates (MCs) were among a slew of digitalisation efforts unveiled by Minister-in-Charge of the Smart Nation Initiative Vivian Balakrishnan in Parliament on Friday, during the debate on the budget of the Prime Minister's Office.
The government's existing Moments of Life (MOL) app, which currently serves young parents and seniors, will be enhanced to house commonly-used government services on a single site. The app will also be personalised for each user.
"At the last count, we had about 100 government apps," said Dr Balakrishnan. "I don't take joy in that number, because citizens often tell me, there's so many, which one do I use? To remedy this, we will systematically streamline the number of apps and our digital offerings."
The MOL app allows parents to access services such as birth registration, baby bonus and National Library Board membership applications. In September 2019, the MOL app was enhanced to include active ageing services. The app has about 120,000 downloads.
With the MOL app, the time spent on birth registrations and baby bonus applications has been cut from an hour to 15 minutes, Dr Balakrishnan noted. Some two-thirds of eligible births are currently registered through the MOL app.
In addition, the government also plans to roll out DigiMC, an initiative involving the digitalisation of MCs, to the private healthcare sector in the first half of 2020, starting with Raffles Medical Group and Mount Alvernia Hospital.
DigiMC was piloted at the National Heart Centre in 2018, and has since been extended to other SingHealth hospitals and polyclinics. Thus far, over 400,000 MCs have been issued under the initiative.
Dr Balakrishnan also addressed how the Smart Nation initiatives can benefit businesses. For one, the government plans to expand its GoBusiness licensing portal, which is currently targeted at the F&B sector, to benefit other industries such as retail, said the Smart Nation and Digital Government Office (SNDGO) in a factsheet. It will also roll out more digital services to help businesses save on costs.
The government also plans to add more features to the National Digital Identity (NDI) infrastructure. It will continue to expand use cases for the SingPass Mobile app, a key element of the NDI. The app, which now has close to one million users, allows easy access to online government services.
For instance, since January 2020, more than 9,000 Central Provident Fund members and their witnesses have used the app to make CPF nominations online.
In addition, the government is testing the use of SingPass for private businesses to conduct identity verification, so that they do not need to develop their own systems.
In a separate speech in Parliament on Friday, Minister-in-Charge of Govtech Janil Puthucheary outlined how digital infrastructure built up under Singapore's Smart Nation initiatives enabled the government's swift response to the Covid-19 outbreak.
One example is MaskGoWhere, a website launched on Feb 1 that helped households find out the location and timing to collect their allocated masks. The website registered over 900,000 visits within the first two days.
The government wants to step up engagement of citizens in Smart Nation efforts, Dr Janil said.
As part of such efforts, the government will expand SCOPE (Smart Nation Co-creating with our People Everywhere), the SNDGO's citizen engagement platform, to involve more citizens at an upstream stage, from ideation to design, to testing and deployment.
Last year, over 23,000 Singaporeans gave their feedback on 13 projects through SCOPE.
