Best way to track CHW working hours inside the CHT app?

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Hi everyone,

We’re working on a deployment where supervisors want to track the number of hours community health workers (CHWs) spend using the CHT app daily or weekly. Ideally, we’d like to measure active usage time, either by recording app session durations or based on when forms are opened and submitted.

Has anyone implemented a similar feature or have ideas on how this could be tracked within the existing CHT framework?

Would love to know if there are recommended approaches, existing analytics tools, or if this would require custom logic within the app.

Thanks for any insights!

Jhonn Mick

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Hello @jhonnmarie! :waving_hand: Unfortunately I do not have a great answer for you here (I am not aware of anyone doing precisely what you are describing here).

However, as I think about possible ways to solve this problem, two different approaches come to mind:

  • I don’t think the CHT, itself, stores any kind of “active usage time” metric for each user. However, it might be possible to infer some of what you want to know from the telemetry data.
    • This would probably be most useful if your CHT instance was configured for data analytics so you could query PostgreSQL for the data you care about.
    • One challenge here, though, is that there is no built-in way in the CHT app to expose this kind of analytics data to end users (e.g. your supervisors).
  • If it is really important that the supervisors can see/track the CHW hours from within the app, the nearest functionality that I can think of is the Aggregate Targets (this is especially true if the supervisors are “offline” users that may not always have network connectivity).
    • As before, I don’t really know of any actual example of someone using targets to track app usage time. But, if we could figure out a viable target-based approach for that, it is possible we could get it to roll-up to the supervisor via the target aggregates.

Perhaps someone else has better ideas here. :folded_hands:

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@jkuester - you and I were talking about this on the Dev Hour and I wanted to follow up with some of the ideas we were kicking around:

  • One concern that was discussed was that “either by recording app session durations” may not be a good proxy for pay. The other suggestion of “based on when forms are opened and submitted” coupled with possibly the quality and quantity of reports might be better. This of course will be best assessed by each local project.
  • MDMs may be able to track app usage time and reported on in a centralized location
  • Another adjacent solution was that MoH KE was interested in researching how to improve battery life on devices that CHWs use. Being able to track which application is in the foreground is an inherent part of this! While no solution was found and deployed, maybe a 3rd party tracking app might work?
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