As of March 2024, Uganda was hosting over 1.6 million refugees in various refugee settlements. The refugee settlements are usually plagued with a number of health challenges including disjointed health systems which can impede refugees from accessing primary health care services. Uganda national community health program involves Village Health Teams (VHTs), these users are trained and engaged to deliver primary health care services. Since 2022, Guild Digital Foundation has worked collaboratively with UNCHR-Uganda and other partners to design, develop and scale a refugee setting Community Health Information System Application (rCHIS app). The rCHIS app supports and guides the current refugee based VHTs to provide promotive, preventive and curative community health services, the app has so far been scaled to 13 refugee settlements in Uganda. The rCHIS app has helped to standardize the delivery of the integrated community health services and the data collected in the app has provided critical information that supports partners and stakeholders to effectively plan and implement effective public health campaigns in the settlements to ensure that the various campaigns reach the targeted population.
Recently, the Uganda refugee project was upgraded from CHT v3.17.0 to v4.10.0 to help ensure that the project benefits from the latest CHT enhancements and improvements including the supervisor multifacility feature, performance improvements and the ability to access APDEX data for app performance evaluation. Prior to the upgrade; the project teams upgraded the testing instance to v4.10.0 and tested it, the enketo forms were also updated to align with CHT v4.x. During the upgrade process, the team backed up data, increased the volume of instance and upgraded the project to 4.10.0. The upgrade of the production instance took 4 days (the project had 243 GB of data). After the upgrade, the VHT supervisors supported the VHTs to upgrade the CHT android version to v1.4.0 and to install the upgraded version of the rCHIS app. So far, over 1,100 VHTs out of 1800 have successfully upgraded to v4.10.0. VHTs using the upgraded version have reported that the new UI has improved the usability and learnability of the app. The project team is now exploring the possibility of adopting the CHT sync to help improve the data synchronization and visualization process.
Thank you @Charlotte_A , @Edwin (the Guild Digital team) and Godfrey Ocan (Medical Teams International) for sharing the project upgrade experience. The insights and lessons you shared have really helped to enrich the community upgrade experience. Here is the recording of the upgrade presentation.