Thank you all for joining our December 2024 Round-up call. You can catch up the highlights by watching the Round-up recording. Also, find below the summarized notes from the call.
Agenda 1: Community story presentation about the use of the barcode feature in Malawi to enhance the quality of data.
Agenda 2: Reduction of the CHT total cost of ownership.
The Product team has been working on the total average cost of hosting CHT, this has been estimated to be 10 $ cents per user/month. Looking into real CHT implementations particularly for AWS hosted instances, disk usage represents a large percentage of CHT hosting costs. Couch stores database data and indexing data, indexing makes up a majority of the disk space that is being used by Couch, research done by the Product team showed that indexes for free text searching took up a large percentage of the disk space being used and Couch is not currently optimized for free text indexing. To make free text search indexes take less space, Couch has support for a query server called Couch Nouveau which is built using Apache Lucene library and is optimized to support free text searching. The Product team has tested the Couch Nouveau queries and the initial findings show a reduction in free text index usage by approximately 85%. It is anticipated that the upgrade process to Couch Nouveau is expected to be seamless since 4.x CHT architecture is designed to support addition of docker containers as needed, a new container will be added which will have Nouveau service that will run beside Couch. The team will be publishing additional documentation on how the kubernetes deployments can set up Couch Nouveau.
Agenda 3: CHT Core 4.14.0 and 4.15.0 releases.
CHT v4.14.0 was released on November 6, 2024. This release has the following improvements and highlights: contact creation is now restricted to direct parent facilities only and sidebar menu improvements have been added to improve the CHT navigation experience. Thank you GallyTi for contributing to CHT sidebar improvements. You can read more about this release here.
CHT v4.15.0 was also released recently, below are some of this release highlights:
- Improved validations for contacts and reports, this allows for more flexibility since multiple custom rules can be combined together.
- The new training materials page has been added to the auxiliary menu of the CHT. Using the training material page, users can access the training content that they have been assigned, a user is able to view the completed training and revisit the completed training content or retake the training that has been completed before.
Please read the CHT v4.15.0 release notes for full details.
Agenda 4: Recap of the Open Digital Health Summit and CHT FHIR mapping options.
The Open Digital Health Summit was held in Nairobi (Kenya) between Dec 1- 3, 2024. The main theme of the conference was for partners to learn how they can leverage open standards, architecture, content and technologies to accelerate and build FHIR interoperable systems for health. In this conference, various partners showcased and shared invaluable lessons about how various digital solutions have aligned with the FHIR standards. CHT is FHIR compliant and it supports interoperability with other systems using FHIR resources, CHT interoperability tools support code systems and standard terminologies. Some third party tools like Open Concept Lab can support the mapping of codes.
It is possible to transform non FHIR data to FHIR resources and in the CHT context this can be done through different ways including: mapping using the CHT outbound push, FHIR mapping structure and customs mediators/middleware. The best recommended approach is to use the custom mediators such as OpenHIM and OpenFn to map the code not configuration, these mediators would need their own infrastructure to run on. Mapping using mediators is powerful and it allows for functional mapping.
Agenda 5: CHT Community Squads update.
The CHT community is implementing various initiatives that aim to increase community contributions to the CHT, one of the approaches that is already ongoing is the CHT community squad. A community squad is a team of CHT contributors consisting of various community members and partners that is formed to co-develop a specific CHT initiative/improvement. A community member can post a feature request or improvement on the CHT forum and invite other community members to collaborate in co-developing the feature, a squad will be formed once a good number of partners and community members are committed to contribute. A squad is involved in co-designing, building, testing and documenting the improvement. Currently, there are two CHT community squads that are co-developing the single sign on and CHT_DHIS2 interoperability using the OpenFn adaptor improvements. Huge thanks to Living Goods, OpenFn, International Committee of the Red Cross, Beehyv, Swiss TPH, Lwala, Beehyv and Ssollinc for being part of the first two CHT community squads and for their contributions so far.
Thank you for your continued support in keeping our community engaged and informed. We look forward to your continued collaboration in 2025.