EPCAS is on track to make life easier for citizens in fuel poverty

We are now nearly halfway through our project and we just held our first steering meeting. As a result of everyone’s efforts we are pleased to say we are on track.

Discovering challenges in energy advocacy

Thanks to our partners in Energy Action Renfrewshire we have made great progress in discovering the problems that citizens and Energy Advocates face.

This team of Energy Advocates based at at Renfrewshire Council goes out every week, visiting citizens in their homes. Every year they help hundreds of citizens to claim discounts they are entitled to. They also ensure thousands of citizens are getting the most out of their heating systems, tackle issues with their suppliers and generally help people to stay warm at the lowest cost to them.

We were fortunate to be able to see the team in action, accompanying them at the busiest time of year. We then mapped out some of the typical journeys that people currently experience. The post on “Jan’s” journey gives you a sense of what we found. We looked at a few journeys and identified patterns in the current experiences of citizens and Energy Advocates who support them, what people found particularly challenging. These “pain points” are what we aim to tackle through the project.

Defining a focus

The challenges become focal points for improving energy advocacy journeys. Pain points for citizens include:

• finding and storing documents
• waiting to hear about results of applications that the Energy Advocate has helped them with
• remembering advice given by their Energy Advocate
• repetition of details that they may have already given at referral or that another trusted organisation holds about them
• having to re-apply for discounts on an annual basis

We have also identified pain points for Energy Advocates and we have have started to develop ways to remove or reduce these pain points through web-based applications that enable secure and easy data flows.

Developing ideas of how journeys can be improved

Our Research Associate, Natasha, has been taking a lead on developing interactive wireframes. These are mock-ups of how the web-based applications will look and function, which will be used to demonstrate how digitally enabled journeys might work and get feedback from citizens and Energy Advocates to improve them.

Exploring the potential and making wider connections

As part of our discovery and definition work for EPCAS it became clear that there are a lot of similar issues in health and social care. Natasha and Jenni, our Project Manager, were fortunate to be able to attend an event run by the Digital Health Institute as a type of workshop called a “Connectathon”. This helped us explore parallels, identify a broader view of the data needed, and connect with people who will benefit from the work we are doing in EPCAS. Our conclusion is that the the same citizens that Energy Advocates work with are very likely to also be on a journey with health and social care services, and so there is lots of potential to support them with person-centred data flows. For that we need a way to create more web app journeys with less effort.

Delivering a valuable legacy for Scotland

Behind the scenes our other Research Associate, Steve, has been working on just that. He is working closely with Mydex CIC’s platform architect, David, to develop an open source framework for delivering seamless journeys, including what we are currently calling the WAG, or Web Application Generator. The WAG will make it easier to produce web-based applications that provide this type of functionality, and will work on any device – phone, tablet, PC – making data flows easier. This is an innovative approach and, once the first version of the WAG is ready, we will use it to create apps that show how it improves Energy Advocacy journeys, based on the feedback from the wireframes. We will be testing these out with citizens and Energy Advocates this summer.

It is really exciting to already have a sense of the potential of what the project is producing. With further development and testing of the WAG the possibilities are endless. Our vision is that citizens will be able to choose to share specific data they have already collected in their secure personal data store so that other services, including health and social care, can help them. Citizens will be able to store the data once from interaction with one service, and use it many times with others. Making energy advocacy journeys smoother is just the start.