Thank you so much for your participation and active engagement at our November 2022 CHT Round-up call. Here is the link to access the call recording and below are summarized notes from the call.
Agenda 1- A community story presented by the BRAC Uganda community health program team on deploying BRAC Afya app which is powered by CHT.
Agenda 2- CHT product management updates.
a) Updates on bulk select and delete functionality
The Care team is still making strides towards the CHT UI/UX evolution. The team is currently working on bulk select and delete functionality on the reports tab. The aim is to remove icons from the bottom bar, currently a user is able to access a checkboxes icon that brings up a bulk select and delete interface on the side. With the new changes the functionality will appear above the bar and away from the main action to align with the Android material design standards and the action button labels will also be clearer. The team will continue to simplify the bottom bar and in the next iterations the team will be working on condensing the functionality into a floating action button.
b) CHT 4.x docker helper.
During the call, the allies team presented the CHT 4.x docker helper video. The video demonstrates how a Developer can start one or more 4.x CHT instances locally without a lot of effort. The docker helper script is available and can support App Developers to download everything that is needed to upgrade to 4.x including upgrade service and all images. The CHT docker helper script is currently publicly available on GitHub branch and will be merged to master soon.
Agenda 3- CHT version 4.0 release.
The 4.0 was released on November 8, 2022 and these are some of the features and improvements that are available on CHT v4.0.
a) CHT v4.0 supports horizontal scaling
CHT v4.0 is currently using docker compose as a default orchestration tool, the docker images for every microservices that CHT requires have been published on the Amazon ecr public repository; these images will be published for every release. This means launching a CHT application will involve a docker compose app which will be pointing to the correct docker compose file. This new architecture brings a lot of benefits including, medic OS will no longer be used instead supported documented orchestration tools like docker and docker compose will be used, discussions are still underway to support other orchestration tools like kubernetes. Docker and docker compose brings transparency on how the CHT is deployed and enables the CHT community to get a lot of support from the massive Docker community and eases onboarding and capacity building. For CHT v4.0 release, the version of CouchDB has not been upgraded and the Product team is planning to upgrade CouchDB to latest v3.2 in the very near future release. Using the updated software Improves the performance and security and get support from the software communities maintaining the software projects.
The performance and scalability tests that were done revealed that the main bottleneck to scale was couchDB CPU resources. From the tests, it was identified that enabling CHT to work over CouchDB clusters instead of a single node can support horizontal scalability. CHT can support up to 12 nodes, documentation will be available on how clustering will work and the product team will be available to provide support.
b) Other major CHT v4.0 improvements which are breaking changes include:
Enketo has been updated, this is a software that CHT uses to render forms. These updates provide more form features, better performance and fixes many bugs. Partners are advised to test configuration prior to the upgrade. The Enketo changes have also been backported to v3.x. CHT android v1.0 or greater has been released which is required for 4.0, this will allow CHT to use modern features and benefit from improved security and performance.
Other improvements include users being able to view the API startup progress screen and dropping of XML report attachments.
Please read the CHTv4.0 release notes for full details, the Product team is still documenting the process of upgrading and building the software to help in the upgrade process. Please reach out on the forum if you need help in upgrading and testing the CHT v4.0
Agenda 4- Open sourcing YendaNafe CHT app by PIH Malawi.
Since 2017, PIH Malawi and Medic have collaboratively co-designed and developed the YendaNafe mobile app, a digital app for community based health service provision and coordination which is powered by CHT. PIH and Medic have coordinated to release the full application source code of YendaNafe app as the first kind of ‘Integrated CHT Reference app`. This commitment to open source the app will allow other digital implementers to access the documentation and source code for free and be able to customize the workflows to meet context specific needs and share feedback.
We look forward to seeing you at the next CHT Round-up call on December 8, 2022.