From data chaos to clarity: S’pore charities use tech with $60k grant to spot needs, improve care

SINGAPORE - It takes a team of educators and therapists at Rainbow Centre to support a single student with autism. But for years, coordinating their work was more difficult than it should be.

Information was scattered across reports, and staff had no standard ways to describe students’ behaviour. This made it harder for staff to spot patterns and intervene.

Now, a clear line on a screen tells them all they need to know.

Staff record behaviour such as meltdowns in a database, using common metrics like frequency, duration and intensity. The system automatically plots the data as a trend line. A spike signals that staff may need to step in, while a dip suggests intervention is working.

Rainbow Centre’s training and consultancy assistant director Belinda Chua said the new tool, introduced in July, helps staff better manage about 900 students across its three schools.

“The tool really helped teachers with all the administrative load, so they can be more focused on analysing the trends and sharpening the interventions,” said Chua.

Such challenges were tackled at the inaugural run of the Data for Good Exchange (D4GX) in 2025, where six social service agencies, including Rainbow Centre, were offered mentorship to build their tech capabilities.

Organised by financial data firm Bloomberg’s philanthropic arm, each agency also received a $60,000 grant to use data to improve operations.

Bloomberg’s regional head of corporate philanthropy for the Asia-Pacific, Vandna Ramchandani, said many charities collect valuable data but do not know how to use it, such as analysing trends to serve clients better.

The programme comes amid a broader push for innovation in the sector.

In July, the Ministry of Social and Family Development announced it would spend $15 million to experiment with new technology.

A total of 57 charities applied for D4GX after Bloomberg made an open call to all Singapore-registered charities at the start of 2025.

They were invited to two workshops in June that year for foundational training in data knowledge.

Six agencies were then chosen for an accelerator programme from September to December 2025 to tackle specific challenges.

They were paired with data experts from Bloomberg and financial industry mentors from GIC, Standard Chartered and UBS.

Spotting caregiver burnout earlier

One participant was CaringSG, a non-profit that supports about 5,000 caregivers of children with special needs and people with disabilities.

Its IT manager, Chris Lim, said it was hard to form a full picture of clients as data was fragmented across different platforms, such as registration forms and records of services.

The organisation created a new platform that compiles information about each caregiver and links them to family members.

This way, staff can identify siblings of special needs individuals at a glance – a vital data point, because sibling caregivers are “a very underserved segment in the caregiving space”, said Lim.

It also flags caregivers who are at higher risk of burnout, and shows which caregivers live near one another so staff can readily pair them up for peer support.

CaringSG chief executive Edwin Tan hopes this innovation will allow them to support caregivers earlier in times of stress, before a crisis hits.

Another D4GX participant, Dover Park Hospice, similarly focused on caregivers.

Caregiver stress builds up gradually, but it was challenging to manually track signs of distress by ploughing through social workers’ unstructured case notes, said Martha Ng, who heads the hospice’s social work and psychosocial services department.

The hospice fed more than 500 case notes into artificial intelligence tools, which were instructed to analyse them using the Zarit Burden Interview – a clinical questionnaire to assess caregivers’ burnout – and generate scores indicating caregivers’ burnout risk.

The analysis revealed a few trends. For example, unemployed individuals who cared for their loved ones alone were at higher risk of burnout. Such information could help staff reach out earlier to caregivers, said Ng.

“While caring, they are also bearing (witness) to pain and suffering... They are grieving over the loss they see every day,” she said, adding that supporting caregivers eases their bereavement process significantly.

Seeing the tools’ potential excited the charities, which have long faced challenges in navigating tech. For instance, it is tough to hire AI specialists for the sector given high demand for such roles, said the hospice’s head of IT, Tan Chong Boon.

The $60,000 grant came in handy. Dover Park Hospice bought licences to trial its idea with different AI engines, while Rainbow Centre hired an external vendor and CaringSG brought a specialist on board.

Bloomberg plans to open the next round of D4GX to applicants in November. The programme will expand beyond data analysis to include AI adoption in its curriculum.