Thank you for participating in our June 2023 CHT Round-up call. Here is the link to access the Round-up call recording and below are brief notes from the call.
1. The first version of stock monitoring workflows as a reusable component.
The West Africa Medic project teams have designed, developed and released the first version of the stock monitoring workflows as a reusable component. The reusable workflows will help to ensure that many projects have a standard way of managing commodities/stocks across different projects. This will also reduce the time Developers spend building the stock monitoring workflows. The current stock monitoring reusable workflows supports three levels of the community health system, these are the CHW, supervisor and health facility levels. The workflow supports users to be able issue stock, order stock, receive stock and carry out stock logs. To add the stock monitoring workflows to a CHT app, one has to install the stock monitoring workflows, initialize the project, add the items and features using the various commands provided. Thank you @Romuald_Dansou for the great presentation and demo, more details on the stock monitoring workflows and the installation process is available here.
The stock monitoring workflow resources are available in this Github repo, community members can test it out locally and share feedback to help improve it. The workflows are currently being used in one project and the team is working on including functional tests to the workflows and adding more details on command usage.
2) CHT v4.2. 0 release, features and improvements.
CHT v4.2.0 was released on May 25, 2023, all CHT new releases are usually posted on the CHT forum. Details of all CHT releases are available here. CHT v4.2.0 release has 2 new features, 13 improvements to existing functionalities, 21 bug fixes and 17 technical improvements.
2a) CHT UI/UX changes in CHT v4.2.0.
There are two user interface changes in CHT v4.2.0, these changes bring CHT closely aligned with other Android apps. The aim of these changes is to make it easier for health workers to use CHT apps and also align CHT with Android UX and material design patterns. With the updated UI, it is easier to add new UI changes in an intuitive way.
The floating action button is currently available on all different tabs that have additive actions (people, tasks and messages tabs). Using a floating action button, users can access primary additive actions and start new care guides. The secondary additive actions (export, edit and delete) have moved from the bottom action bar to a new more option menu which is located at the top right side of the screen.
2b) Remote training components.
Using the training card feature, users are presented with an in-app window which alerts them that there are important changes to the app. Users can click through to learn about the changes. Default training content has been provided to highlight the current CHT UI/UX changes, the current training content is downloadable and is customizable. In the default content, there is an initial card that alerts users to the new changes. After the initial card the next card shows what the previous app version looks like and a couple of cards that shows the new changes. The final card encourages users to reach out to supervisors in case they have questions. Once a user completes the training, the card is available in the reports tab.
2c) Supervisor CHW create feature.
This feature is available on CHT v4.2.0 and it enables an offline supervisor to be able to provision the add contact form to create a new user (CHW). Once the add contact form is submitted and the information synced, the CHW login information is sent to the CHW using token logins link and the CHW can use the link to automatically access CHT when they come online. The token link is currently valid for 24 hours and the passwords are automatically set. For this feature to work effectively, the CHW needs to have a device and the device should have the CHT installed.
CHT v4.2.0 has the following few additional improvements and bug fixes:
- New custom scripts have been added which makes it possible to run arbitrary blocks of JavaScript inside the CHT. This makes it easier for CHT to support risk score calculation based on machine learning models.
- After refactoring the initial CHT replication mechanism, the initial replication on CHT v4.2.0 is now 8 times faster than before. This improvement only affects the initial replication.
CHT v4.2.0 has lots of improvements and bug fixes, please read the CHT v4.2.0 release notes to learn more about the improvements, bug fixes and technical improvements.
3. CHT product updates and Interoperability work
3a) CHT Watchdog
CHT Watchdog is a monitoring and alerting system based on open source utilities Grafana and Prometheus which makes it easy to run it using a docker based deployment, more improvements around the accuracy of the alerts have been added to the latest version of CHT watchdog.
The Product Allies team is also working on doing purge configuration improvements, the improvements will enable App Developers to be able to do a dry run of the purge configuration and get a count of the affected documents without applying the changes to the server. If you like to test this and validate the feature, please reach out to @mrjones and @jkuester
3b) CHT interoperability work.
The Product Ecosystem team has been working on a project that creates a mediator to allow CHT and requesting systems to communicate under OpenHIM and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards using lost to follow up workflow. The resources on CHT interoperability are available in this CHT-interoperability repo, please feel free to test it locally. The team has been working to ensure that all mediators endpoints are FHIR compliant. The team has started to build end to end tests to ensure any new changes won’t break the workflow. In the spirit of sharing the work the team has been doing, the team has published blogs on CHT interoperability, please check out Interoperability in Digital Healthcare and Revolutionizing Healthcare Coordination blogs.
3c) CHT sync and CHT pipeline
The CHT CouchDB database is currently not designed to support real time data analytics. The Ecosystem team is currently working on CHT sync and CHT pipeline to help synchronize data from CouchDB to PostgreSQL which will facilitate analytics on Superset dashboards in real time.
- CHT sync uses LogStash CouchDB source and postgREST for data synchronization.
- CHT pipeline will transform data into more useful format that can be visualized on dashboards.
Both CHT sync and CHT pipeline will be ready by end of quarter 2, 2023. The Ecosystem team is hoping that the CHT community can adopt these tools as robust alternatives to the current cough2pg.
If you have any questions, please post them here.
It was great connecting with you and we look forward to your presence at our next CHT Round-up call on July 13, 2023.