Thank you to those who managed to join the October 2024 Round-up call, it was exciting to see community members from 15+ different countries join the call. You can access the call recording here and below are summarized notes from the call.
October 2024 Round-up summarized notes
Agenda 1- Community story presentation about improving rCHIS app usability and performance by upgrading to CHT v4.10.0
Agenda 2 - CHT product updates.
2a) CHT new navigation updates
Over the past year the Cares team has been making incremental changes to the CHT interface to make it more aligned to material design patterns so that it is more similar to other android experiences and it is easier for CHWs to onboard on CHT. The final navigation change was released recently in CHT v4.12.0; on the mobile app, the tabs have been moved to the bottom of the screen this make the tabs more ergomically accessible, other actions are available on the top bar and the menu is a side draw that opens from the left side. In desktop, the navigation bar and the menu have been moved to the left side of the screen. The support for old of features and UI i.e. old action bar, filter and search have been removed because the new design elements can’t co-exist together with the old UI. It is still possible to opt out of the new UI via permissions.
2b) Training cards update.
The training cards were released in May 2023 to enable remote training of users within the CHT. In Q3 2024, the training cards were used in one of the project to train about 10,000 users remotely. During the training; the onboarding data was analyzed and it showed that 9,000 users had completed the remote training while 800 users had seen the training cards but had not completed the training. The Care team team talked to a few CHPs to gather their experience in using the training cards and the feedback that the CHPs shared has informed some of the enhancements the Care team is currently working on. The improvements that the team is working on include: improving the training card documentation, cards with long content to have a scroll button, confirmation message to be improved, training card will be displayed once per day rather than with every fresh reload to avoid a lot of disruptions, more SQL queries will provided to provide additional training evaluation metrics and the team is in process of designing a solution to enable CHWs to revisit the training cards.
2c) CHT Sync updates.
CHT Sync is a replacement of standalone couch2pg, CHT Sync supports the visualization of CHT data on dashboards in near real time. To make this possible, couch2pg copies data from the couch database to postgress in a single column (this data can’t be queried). DBT is used to change this data to a relational database and data visualization tools can be used to visualize this data. The CHT sync has been proven in production and the team has documented the learnings and the standalone couch2pg has been deprecated. Documentation is now available to guide community members on how they migrate from couch2pg to CHT Sync and how one can set up CHT Sync with kubernetes.
Agenda 3 - CHT core release updates
Two CHT releases were released recently, these are CHT v4.11.0 and CHT v4.12.0. CHT v4.11.0 has the following 3 highlights; the API for fetching people has been extended to allow one to get a group of people through pagination, this version also allows for duplicate valid phone input to be entered; this is useful for projects that supports phone sharing and the contact summary has more target documents. More details about the CHT v4.11.0 release is available here.
CHT v4.12.0 was released on October 3, this release has 2 features, 1 bug fix and 17 technical improvements. This version has changes to the user interface and navigation, additional information have been added to the monitoring API about the storage use of the CHT; this information now enables implementers to get a better picture of the storage usage overtime and thus be able to estimate the total cots of hosting CHT apps. Please check out the CHT v4.12.0 release notes for more details.
Agenda 4 - community introductions
We were privileged to have @felixgerber from the ComBacal team join the Round-up. ComBaCal project is an implementation research programme that uses innovative approaches to increase the quality of chronic disease care delivery. Through the programme, the village health workers (VHWs) working in rural districts in Lesotho have been empowered with a CHT based app to supports them to screen, diagnose and provide first line treatment for NCDs. The team has so far published some data on use of CHT from the pilot study: (empowering CHWs to take up more responsibilities in NCD care and use of CHT to support community based NCD care).
We look forward to seeing you at our next Round-up on November 14, 2024.