Thank you for your active participation and thoughtful feedback at the June 2024 Round-up call. Here is the link to access the Round-up recording and below are summarized notes from the call.
Agenda 1: CHT support for dynamic form content.
ODK XForms are used to render forms in CHT. XForms typically have two components; models and user interface. The model contains instance, bindings (formulae, relevant conditions and constraints) and data storage mechanism that contains the form elements and options while the user interface has a standard set of visual controls. Once the form is filled and submitted, the data is sent to an XForm data processor.
Last year, Medic worked with D-tree to design, build and test digital payment workflows. For this initiative, payment data was displayed within forms using the XForm standard. The teams leveraged the XML Character Data (CDATA) element feature that instructs XML processor not to interpret any kind of markup to pull the CHVs monthly performance data from targets, an external service was deployed to support processing and generation of tables that were uploaded within the CHT forms to support the CHV supervisors to verify CHV monthly performance metrics.
Agenda 2: Enabling supervisors to manage multiple areas.
The Care team has been working on a feature that allows a supervisor to manage multiple community health units (CHUs). During the Round-up call, @michael showcased how an Admin can set up a supervisor to manage multiple CHUs. Supervisors who are supposed to be assigned multiple CHUs need to have (can_have_multiple_places) permission, this is a new permission that has been introduced. When creating users, one has to make sure that the selected role has the required permission and the selected places must be at the same hierarchy level. A supervisor that manages 1 CHU is able to view all the CHW areas while a supervisor with multiple CHUs is able to view the CHUs and they have to tab on the specific CHU to view the list of CHW areas. On the reports page, a level of breadcrumbs have been added for a supervisor with multiple CHUs which makes it easy for a supervisor to know which CHU a specific CHW is associated with, a supervisor can also filter different CHUs. An additional lineage level has also been added on the task and messages pages. The aggregate target has been disabled for supervisors with multiple facilities, this will be worked on in future iterations, supervisors supporting 1 CHU will still have access to the target aggregate metrics. Videos demonstrating the functionalities of the supervisor feature can be accessed here, the development for the supervisor improvement is complete and is expected to be available in the next CHT release.
Agenda 3: Upcoming CHT navigation updates.
The Care team has been rolling out the CHT app navigation changes, the team has been communicating with users and partners about these updates on various platforms and they are currently conducting periodic surveys to find out if community members are aware of the upcoming CHT navigation changes. The upcoming CHT designs have a few changes including moving tabs to the bottom; for each of the tabs, the tab name will appear at the top and other tabs will appear at the bottom, the current tab will be highlighted in white. The CHT hamburger menu will be moved to the left hand side and it will open on the side drawer.
The team has started to test the new CHT designs with CHWs and preliminary usability results show that the majority of the participants could not recognize that tabs have been moved from the top to the bottom, the Facilitator had to probe further for users to identify the changes. During the usability testing, CHWs were assigned tasks based on new CHT app designs and most of the users said that the tasks were easy to do although a few users were confused on the first attempt. The Care team would like to continue collaborating with more partners to test the new CHT UI changes to help identify areas that are easy to use, aspects that are confusing to users and areas that might need additional training for seamless transition to the new UI. Please reach out to @leah and @Nicole_Orlowski if you are interested to test the new CHT UI navigation changes.
Agenda 4: Android 12+ deep links support.
Android deep links is a feature that allows one to link a domain with the application, if a deep link is clicked it opens the link in the application itself and not in the browser. Token login is an authentication mechanism in which users receive a one time app login (SMS in the case of CHT), end users can open the link to authenticate themselves. Token logins have a lot of benefits over the passwords, this includes: tokens are more secure, they reduce the passwords management overhead like password policies and the app is more accessible to users - users do not experience the password challenges like the password being too long, complicated and some users entering incorrect password hence providing a better user experience. Previously if a user received a token login on Android 12+, they were being redirected to the browser, after the implementation of Android deep links in CHT, users are now being redirected into the CHT android application.
Agenda 5: CHT Core release updates and contribution updates.
a) CHT v4.7.0 and V4.7.1 release updates.
CHT v4.7.0 was released on May 7, in this version the missing Spanish, French and Swahili translations were added to make CHT more inclusive to other languages aside from English. An additional development step has been added to CHT to ensure that Swahili, Nepali, French and Spanish translations are added for every English description. This version also has lots of other improvements and features including:
- New UI/UX card updates to align with material.
- Support to get the difference between two dates in various time formats, this feature was developed and contributed by the Cape Town Systematic Healthcare Action Research Project consortium technical team.
- Updates making the countdown timer widget a required field in forms, this feature was designed and developed by the Living Goods technical team.
A big thank you to all the partners for their contributions, please read the CHT v4.7.0 release notes for full details. A critical bug was discovered in v4.7.0 that prevented further upgrades from 4.7.0 and it was fixed in CHT v4.7.1. To prevent anyone from upgrading to CHT v4.7.0, the version has been removed from the CHT release list.
b) CHT v4.8.0 release
CHT v4.8.0 was released on May 23. The release has significant performance improvements in the contact list page which is one of the most visited pages by the CHWs when they are delivering care. Two security issues have been fixed in this release, the security issues were discovered by Alex Anderson (a Software Developer). Partners are advised to upgrade to this version to get the best possible cyber security protection.
c) CHT contributor Hall of fame.
We are grateful to everyone who has contributed to the CHT over the years. You can find the list of contributors to CHT repos and those who have disclosed CHT security vulnerabilities here.
We hope to see you again at the next Round-up on July 11, 2024.