On the road to precision community health: How the Community Health Toolkit can support data quality at the platform level

Implementation Research
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Aided by digital tools, Community health workers (CHWs) are increasing access to healthcare services, bettering healthcare seeking behaviors and improving clinical outcomes within communities they serve.

Despite research showing that digitally supported CHWs accelerate the delivery of healthcare, there is continued mistrust in the quality of data collected by CHWs. This mistrust has curtailed initiatives like precision community health that leverage data and analytics to deliver the right intervention at the right time to the right population.

Good quality data is key to advance good health, human flourishing, and equitable care for and with the hardest-to-reach communities through digital tools that help health workers deliver just, quality care to their neighbors and community.

In this blog post (https://medic.org/stories/on-the-road-to-precision-community-health/ ), I discuss how Medic has partnered with DataKind to develop a toolkit that supports data quality at scale.

I’m interested in the experiences of the CHT community in this area and how they would like to benefit from this work. Thank you for reading, and I welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions about this topic.

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The Community Health Toolkit’s emphasis on precision community health and platform-level data quality is truly inspiring! Ensuring robust data collection and management at the foundational level can significantly enhance decision-making and health outcomes.
I’m curious, how does the toolkit handle challenges like data interoperability between different systems? This seems critical for scaling such a promising approach.

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Proper data interop is hugely important! Check out these docs for an overview of the CHT’s FHIR-based data exchange approach.

Also, just to call out a few other pages linked from that overview, here are the technical details about setting up the FHIR mediator. Additionally, the CHT has some more targeted integrations with common services such as DHIS2/OpenMRS/RapidPro.

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