Chronologies
Help us develop an AI-powered chronology drafting tool
It is likely that the absence of structured chronologies contributed to key information being missed when decisions were made
Professor Jay - 2014 report on child sexual exploitation in Rotherham
I regard the inclusion in any case file of a clear, comprehensive and up-to-date chronology as absolutely essential
Lord Laming - 2004 report into the death of Victoria Climbié
We are looking for co-design partners to help us design and develop an AI-powered auto-drafting tool for chronologies. We’d love to talk to teams in social services, special needs education, charities - anywhere that chronologies, or ‘executive summaries of time series data’, are used.
Product vision
It takes days to draft a chronology. If a chronology could be created automatically and accurately, it would free up time for social workers. By providing a concise and regularly updated overview of each child’s journey, it could also improve service provision.
Call for design partners
To make Chronologies a reality, we hope to collaborate with social services teams and other organisations that look after vulnerable service users.
There are a number of stages of engagement. All are useful. You can withdraw at any stage - by taking part in Stage 1, you are not committing to Stage 2, etc.
Stage 1: Initial conversation
Stage 2: Workshop
Explore the desired features of the Chronologies.AI tool, understand your workflows, understand how you’d evaluate chronologies, explore whether there are different chronologies for different purposes.
Stage 3: Data access
We’d work with your data governance team, so that we can have access to example cases in a secure environment, of course. This allows us to fine tune and evaluate the machine learning models inside Chronologies.
Stage 4: Prototype testing
As we develop Chronologies.AI, we will ask for your feedback on various prototype versions.
To discuss getting involved, or if you've got any questions, contact Andy Bell on andy@helpfirst.ai or 07932 047197
FAQs
Benefits: What's in it for us?
- We’ll offer you reduced cost access to the Chronologies tool in perpetuity
- You’ll get the PR benefit that comes from bringing an AI tool to market to benefit vulnerable users. (A precedent is the way that Bedfordshire Police benefited from being design partner for NEC’s DocDefender AI tool as per this BBC article: Bedfordshire Police use AI to save hours on admin duties)
- Be part of the solution! Social care is drowning in admin. AI offers new possibilities. The UK needs innovative partnerships between social care organisations and AI innovators to build new solutions.
- See AI development action. HelpFirst have delivered award-winning, transformative AI projects. Being a Chronologies design partner gives an understanding of what bigger AI-powered changes might look like.
Costs: What will it require?
- Being a design partner is free of charge.
- The significant cost is your team's time. Approximately:
- Stage 1: 45 minutes
- Stage 2: Workshop - 3-5 hours
- Stage 3: Data access - TBC
- Stage 4: Prototype testing - TBC
Timescales for Design Partner Programme
We are hoping to do Stages 1-3 in Q1 2025, and Stage 4 in Q2.
If we get to Stage 3, how can we be sure that our data will be kept secure?
- HelpFirst is CyberEssentials certified and is working towards ISO27001
- HelpFirst has worked with major national charities and the ScotGov program CivTech, meeting their standards for information governance and ethical AI implementation.
- We will help you draft a Data Protection Impact Assessment and guide you through completing the necessary Data Protection Agreement.
- We can be flexible. E.g. We could work with data within your platform or tenant, so that the data never leaves your control.
Where precisely would Chronologies be used?
We are looking to discuss this with you and your team. Where is the greatest need? We are keen to explore:
- Front door services: completing assessments. Perhaps early help assessment teams first to manage risks as these are people needing support rather than those needing statutory services.
- Preparing court documents
Why are you starting with Chronologies? Far more useful would be auto-drafting some other document.
We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Who is HelpFirst?
HelpFirst develops AI tools to improve case management of vulnerable service users:
- Citizens Advice Scotland say: “HelpFirst has redefined what safeguarding looks like. In the past, we were all terrified of missing a service user’s vulnerabilities. HelpFirst provides an AI safety net, catching what humans miss. It means we are making better decisions in high priority situations.”
- HelpFirst recently won a £600k project from the Scottish Government to use AI to reduce the admin burden on special needs teachers.
- In December 2024, HelpFirst won the Holyrood Award for Digital Public Services at the Scottish Parliament.
The Priority Services Register (PSR) is a key tool that energy suppliers use to fulfil their responsibilities to vulnerable customers. But there isn't just one register. Every energy company has their own PSR and the application forms vary unpredictably from supplier to supplier.
As part of our CivTech Challenge, we’ve been researching best practice across the industry. We were left with lots of questions:
- Why is 'restricted hand movement' a vulnerability that almost all suppliers assess?
- Why are archaic phrases like ‘bedridden’ used?
- Why does only one supplier check if their vulnerable customers use ‘electric showering’?
Alas, we weren't able to fully answer these questions. But here’s a visual guide to various PSR forms, so you can get an overview of the landscape.
Overview
We accessed PSR application forms for Ovo Energy, British Gas, SSE, Octopus, EDF, Shell and Utilita. For many other suppliers, access is restricted.
The first observation is that the application forms are extremely varied:
- We’ve grouped questions into categories to make things a bit easier to read, however the forms themselves come in very different structures. Some offer all their options in one long list, some separate into smaller sections. Some only show certain sections once a customer has selected a particular option (e.g. selecting ‘sight loss’ gets you extra questions on the Shell application).
- Several vulnerabilities are only mentioned by one supplier. Only one asks about autism, and another asks about breathing difficulties. The following options only showed up once: ‘female presence preferred’, ‘longer time to answer the door’ and ‘bedridden’.
- For sensory needs: ‘blind’ and ‘partially sighted’ are separate options in all the forms. 'Hearing impairment' and 'deaf' are combined in half the forms and the former is not asked at all in one. This may be contentious, as hearing impairment and being deaf are very different conditions.
- Some suppliers include options for accessible information provision in the same form (i.e. braille, large print letters, etc.) Others link to an additional form, or do not reference it at all.
- When temporary conditions are mentioned, only some suppliers allow the customer to select a date when they believe the condition will no longer apply.
- Most of the forms are multiple choice, limiting to what the supplier chooses to ask about. Occasionally the supplier (e.g. EDF) gives the customer a larger space to talk about their conditions, equipment and needs in more detail.
Next, we dive deeper into the application forms.
Medical Conditions2
EDF’s application form has the highest number of options related to medical conditions (20 in total) with British Gas and Utilita featuring the lowest (13). EDF also features options which cover multiple medical conditions (e.g. 'breathing difficulties', 'disability benefits') more frequently than other suppliers. SSE has the highest number of options for learning and mental health related conditions (including 'dyslexia', 'autism', 'learning difficulties' and 'anxiety/depression').
There is some overlap within options, which could be confusing. For example, SSE lists both ‘developmental condition’ and ‘autism’ separately, even though the latter is a type of the former. Another example is the ‘mental ill health’ and ‘anxiety/depression’ options, again found in the SSE form. It is not clear if customers should tick both or only the more specific option.
All organisations feature options to indicate older age, however they specify a variety of different ages as the lower threshold, including: 60+, 65+, 'pensionable age' or 'pensioner'. British Gas have two separate options relating to older age ('pensionable age (65 and over)' and 'age 75 and over').
There is some degree of consistency across organisations. This appears to be where specific conditions have been mentioned within the Ofgem guidance (for instance, 'restricted hand movement' appears in all but one form, in spite of the fact this is a very specific need).
Language Used
The language used across suppliers is very inconsistent. SSE uses ‘hard of hearing’ and ‘deaf’ to describe hearing loss-related needs, while other suppliers employ terms such as ‘hearing impairment’ or ‘hearing impaired’.
Some options have multiple potential meanings: ‘carer’ could refer to the respondent either needing a carer or being a carer for someone else.
All suppliers ask about speech and language difficulties and broader language barriers. However there is no shared way of asking whether a customer speaks English. Variations include: 'unable to communicate in English', 'language barrier' and 'foreign language speaker'.
‘Unable to communicate in English’ (used by Octopus and Ovo) is somewhat ambiguous. Customers might take it to mean having a different first language or having a speech condition. The requirements are quite different: with the former you could use an interpreter or multilingual support, with the latter you would need different support.
Medical Equipment3
Options Offered
British Gas do not offer any specific options for types of medical equipment: they solely offer the generic category ‘mains powered electric medical equipment’. All other organisations surveyed have more specific options. These are broadly consistent across suppliers with some more limited options (e.g. ‘wheelchair’, ‘MDE electric showering’).
Most organisations (bar British Gas and EDF) also ask about reliance on water.
Language Used
It is unclear what is meant by the ‘life support’ option used by EDF. Often the phrase ‘life support machine’ refers to a ventilator, but EDF also have a separate option for ‘heart and lung ventilators’. It could mean life support as a condition or set of needs but that seems too broad for the PSR.
Temporary Changes
In a rare show of unanimity, all suppliers offer the same options for temporary changes.
householder <18
and under
Other Questions
Passwords
All suppliers offered the option of setting up a password or PIN. This is usually so a technician can state this password as an additional security measure on home visits. Two suppliers required a 6-letter password, one an 8-letter password and one a 10-letter password. A final supplier did not specify length. An unfortunate side effect of this variation is that if an individual were to move supplier, they may need to change their password and remember a new one. (Note: not shown in an infographic.)
Life Scenarios
Varying from the multiple choice standard, Shell veer into first person narratives. In their ‘Nominee Scheme’ section of the form, they feature an additional tick box option: ‘I can be easily confused and worried by communications from my energy supplier’. When asking about meter support they offer: ‘I have a prepayment meter and no-one in my household is able to safely read it or top it up’.
Accessibility Information4
Organisations vary on including accessibility questions on their PSR form. Ovo offers seven different accessibility options for receiving information, while Shell offers a single broad range checkbox.
Conclusions
Suppliers diverge considerably in what information they collect on their customers to register them for Priority Services support.
On our travels we encountered the aspiration to create a more standardised or universal PSR. Initiatives like the Vulnerability Registration Service and Experian’s Support Hub aim in this direction. In the future we are keen to explore the user experience of these services and how they aid vulnerable customers.
In the meantime, we hope this analysis will prove useful if you are looking to improve the experience of vulnerable energy customers. Any questions or comments, contact harriet@helpfirst.ai. We’d love to hear from you!
Footnotes
- SSE was acquired by Ovo Energy in 2020. They hadn't completed their move over when we started this research and were still registering people to their PSR. We’ve included them in this analysis as their approach was interesting with many mental health and developmental condition-type questions.
- Some questions have been condensed in the infographics. Numbers referenced in the discussion refer to the full options as available on the questionnaires, but the infographics demonstrate a condensed version for brevity and ease of visualisation. Full original data is available on request.
- 'Heart/lung machine & ventilator' is the most common formulation of question regarding this equipment. However EDF separates these questions into: 'heart/lung machine' and 'ventilator'.
- Octopus and British Gas do not ask about accessibility. Shell only offers a general ‘accessible information’ needs tick box if the customer has earlier selected that they have a visual impairment. This does not mean they do not record this information elsewhere, where these questions did not appear on their forms we were not able to verify what (or if) they ask about accessible information.
