Guest blog: how the UK government can use AI to improve services for citizens

Guest blog: how the UK government can use AI to improve services for citizens

We've already seen over the past year or so how AI speeds up slow, manual processes. From streamlining bureaucratic tasks to improving public safety, the use of AI has opened up the path to more efficient, transparent and responsive services.

At a time where governments face so many challenges to do more with less, AI represents massive opportunity. People are already seeing the advantage, as they can now access certain services so much faster and easier.

As someone who works closely with data-driven organisations, here are three areas where I believe the public sector could benefit from using AI.

Improper payments

Preventing fraudulent payments is a never-ending task these days. As cybercriminals are getting smarter along with the AI tech they are using, the best way of dealing with this is to fight fire with fire - or AI with AI.

AI can quickly process hundreds of thousands of data points to identify suspicious behaviour. The US Department of Health and Human services recently deployed AI as a fraud combatting tool.

When they looked back at the claims they received in 2021, they found that 6.2% of them were fraudulent. That volume of claims was the equivalent to roughly $25 billion. Keen to avoid this kind of issue in the first place, they wanted to look into how they could identify and stop these types of claims from happening.

With the help of AI, they introduced a process of automatically evaluating claims at the time of submission. Small batches that usually took a long time to analyse could now be done faster on a larger scale. The early results are promising and the Department of Health and Human Services intends to increase their deployment.

Court backlogs

Legal proceedings took a big hit in 2020, as many trials had to be postponed owing to the pandemic. These delays had a ripple effect that, even four years later, the system is still working through. The latest records say that over 65,000 cases in the UK alone are still waiting. A new record high.

Part of the difficulty of dealing with case backlogs is the manual processing that it takes to evaluate each case and route it through judicial systems in an accurate way. Much of the initial processing necessary could be expedited with the help of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

One challenge of employing this technology for court backlogs is that often the data that needs processing is "unstructured", meaning that it does not necessarily exist in a neat table or spreadsheet. Thankfully, modern AI technologies are solving for this problem by enabling even unstructured data, such as a .pdf document or other text-based file to be processed by computers. AI is now able to look through hundreds of thousands of files in just seconds or minutes, and quickly pull out the information needed. Teams can focus more on the case at hand rather than searching for the information they need. This technology could have a profound impact on working through court backlogs.

Healthcare

It's not just courts that have an issue with backlogs and delays. Healthcare is another industry that is trying to bring their numbers down. In fact, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) estimates it will take almost 10 years for NHS waiting lists to come down to 2010 levels.

Similar to the opportunity to improve court backlogs, using AI, the NHS has the potential to quickly look at reports and files to rework them into more straightforward patient records - making them more accessible to care givers and helping ease the admin workload for short-staffed clinics.

Looking towards the future

Governmental departments using more AI in their daily tasks represents a lot of opportunities to better serve citizens. When used correctly, it'll help services work more efficiently, and speed up a lot of issues that many people currently have.

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.