@Max thanks for the welcome.
Organisation: Living Goods
Type: CHT contributor and CH implementer
The linked document covers most of the items that we want to see being able to be configured for a supervisor user. Another key piece to this would be the context in which this works - more specifically in regards to hierarchy. We are increasingly seeing the need to support peer supervision which is basically, CHWs who are more skilled are mentoring and supporting other CHWs. To achieve this i would imagine we need a flexible hierarchy feature which i have seen is already on the works as part of v 3.7.0 . The other feature would be a way to incorporate incentives (cash and non cash giveaways to CHWs based on performance) so that as a CHW, based on my perfomance i’m able to know how much i have earned.
Hi @vchelule,
Thanks for the feedback.
Yes, we are very excited for the upcoming release of the flexible hierarchy feature. It’s been a long-time coming and one of the most often requested improvements. Interested to receive feedback on the use case for peer supervisor support that you referenced.
Can you link to any examples of digital payments or rewards platforms/plugins that you like? As you know, we are also big advocates of fair wages for CHW’s. Integrating payments or rewards functionality into the app could definitely be worth exploring further.
I wonder @vchelule @Max if there’s a way that an incentives workflow could be supported with the core framework’s existing features. One of the key workflow design questions is whether these rewards can be fully automated based on pre-defined rules, or whether the idea would be to have a human supervisor or manager review a health workers data, and then at the end of the month calculate and award a defined stipend/incentive. Full automation would be a little more complex, but my understanding is that Living Goods currently supports the second approach–is that correct?
If so, one can imagine configuring a supervisor app in which there is a form called something like monthly incentive. Based on the supervisor’s review of a health worker’s performance for that month, they would submit that form for a given health worker, and there would be fields for the total payment amount, the phone number that the health worker has registered with a mobile money service (I think this field could be configured to automatically pre-populate with contextual info from the contact profile), and perhaps notes about what the incentive was awarded for (e.g. 200 shillings for meeting ANC targets, 400 shillings for meeting ICCM targets, and 2,500 shillings base stipend). The targets tab is more often used to show a health worker tallies of data from forms that they have submitted, but if the form is submitted by a supervisor about a CHW, I think you could still have a count of total incentives show up in the targets tab.
If the implementation were using version 3.5 or above of the core framework, they could configure the outbound push feature to trigger a REST request to Safaricom’s M-Pesa API or another mobile money provider or a value added service provider.
What do you think @vchelule, would this kind of workflow potentially meet your needs? If you end up experimenting with a prototype like this, I’d love to see you post about it!
I really like that idea @isaacholeman, could we also in the mean time think about maybe displaying the amount earned- and we can assign an amount to a certain form etc. Like this…
Hi @joyanne, this looks like a good incremental solution for testing. Thanks for sharing! Perhaps one of the CHT partners has a compensation program that we could learn more about to identify if/how a tech solution like this would integrate.
Hi @Max, excited to see this feature being moved forward! Overall I agree with the user stories we have prioritized to start with - its a really great set of essentials.
I have a few minor questions and suggestions.
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Are we considering additions to targets widget types within the scope of this feature?
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Being able to generate tasks based on targets, calculations across targets is really exciting! Would we also be able to use targets + forms (thinking monthly meeting forms etc) to inform these tasks? Another way to approach that question would be – would we need to configure a particular performance metric in targets if we needed it to trigger a CHW performance related task?
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Goals in targets — could we explore how flexible we can be with how the goals can be configured (preconfigured goal that applies to all users of that type will not work for all cases), currently we can only set the value of the goal per widget, that is likely to be a big limitation for many health systems. E.g. number of pregnancies expected in one CHW’s area is different from what’s expected in another CHWs area (same for a health facility’s catchment population) and the numbers change every year.
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Tables — I see the value of being able to see performance of all CHWs laid out in the same place for comparison and easy access, however, a table format is likely to be challenging to fit and display properly in our app. Throwing in a couple very rough ideas just off the top of my head. Would be great to dig into this user story a bit more if it’s deemed to be within the scope of this particular thread.
- Targets could have a “CHW view” instead of/in addition to “aggregate targets view?" – this would probably require us having an additional widget kind. Either showing a composite performance metric or listing a few prioritized metrics in a single card.
- CHW area card could include a performance highlight
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the point raised by @hhornung re the display of supervisor vs CHW sync status is really important and pertinent to most settings we work in. In addition to displaying a warning for the supervisor to update, we’ll probably also need to have a place to display the last synced time for supervisor in case they are in a place where they are not able to sync but would like to know how recent the information they are seeing is. We will also need to consider how we check and display the targets last updated information in the targets tab where the information is aggregate for all CHWs. In the current mockups we only display this in the individual CHW’s profile. That does not help us know (not easily) how up to date the data is when we are looking at aggregate information across CHWs.
@vchelule would this be something that’s helpful for your incentive program? We could test how that can integrate into the targets set for pregnancies etc
Hi @ranju thanks for the feedback. Excellent points that we can integrate into the improvements roadmap. A few follow-up comments/questions:
Yes, please share any concepts that you are/would like to explore.
In this use case, a task for a CHW would be conditional based on time bound performance metrics. Does this align with what you’re thinking?
We’ve had good discussion around improving catchment areas for CHW’s (geographic, household numbers, etc). It seems like this may be a prerequisite to the ability to increase granularity of goal setting. Do you agree? This is a broad topic area and worth exploring in a separate thread.
@hhornung I think D-Tree has done some work around incentives and making that information available digitally. Your insights could be beneficial here
Sorry for the long silence. There’s lot’s of great suggestions in this thread.
- I definitely see a value for displaying the amount earned. We had this in a past program (not using CHT), and had simple tables/reports in both CHV and supervisor apps. Looking at this from the CHV’s point of view, a drawback for them might be it’s difficult to calculate the final sum if there’s a larger number of targets.
- I also generally like the suggestion to generate tasks based on targets. Our supervisors are supposed to follow-up with low-performing CHVs, so automating this could make things easier for them. On the other hand, the application logic could become complex quickly: while after some months our supervisors might get a feeling with which CHVs they need to follow up more closely, putting all this into hard and fast rules might not be the best option (could be too complex, give a false sense of “security” if tasks not triggered, could trigger tasks to early/too often/unnecessarily, etc.).
- Goals in targets: we are currently also hitting this limitation. We wanted to define goals based on the number of people/households/kids U5/etc. registered in a CHVs catchment area. While it’s generally possible, a limitation is that we would calculate the target based on people/etc. registered in the last month, to avoid “moving targets”. For example, if we say x% of registered U5 children should be visited, if you register a child, your target changes, which led to CHV frustration in a past program.
- Tables: We are currently experimenting with this. Depending on screen layout and the amount of data, it might be possible to come up with a design that requires only horizontal or vertical scrolling instead of both. Even if scrolling is required, the information a table conveys could be superior to the information you get navigating “through the hierarchy”.
- Automated payment of incentives: while really interesting, we probably would not opt to do this at this point since in the past there had been a) too much need for manual adjustment (e.g. people weren’t able to synchronize due to network issues), and b) too much back and forth with a mobile money service provider due to different issues. However, for scalability, automation and distribution of inventive payment approvals, e.g. to supervisors, are interesting points to discuss.
Thanks for the continued feedback on the supervisor improvements concepts. We are working on pulling together a more complete plan that incorporates requests from this thread as well as from recent field visits. Progress will be posted here. This thread will remain open so feel free to add any additional thoughts or comments.
Hi all,
I’m currently working on part of this feature and wanted to share some progress. Below are examples of 4 target instances: count with no goal, count with goal, percentage with no goal and percentage with goal.
I’d love some feedback on this and have a few questions:
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What are some thoughts on a dynamic sidebar where the order of the list of target updates based on completion (ex. targets least complete are shown at the top)? Would this be too jarring?
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Is showing “2 out of 3” clear enough on the sidebar to indicate that 2 of 3 CHWs have met their target? This is displayed more clearly in the content panel but I’m thinking this may be unclear on mobile at first glance.
Thanks!
A quick update to where I’ve landed to date:
- Counts without goals will be shown as a number or percentage
- Counts with goals will include a progress bar (similar to target widgets) for a quicker visual indication of status
I love the progress bar on the counts with goals! I personally do find “2 out of 3” in the side bar a little confusing at first glance, but I think within the context of the view and content panel it becomes clear.
Looking good @Nicole_Orlowski! Really cool to see this shaping up. FWIW, here’s my take on your questions and some additional input:
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I think a dynamic sidebar would be really cool, and not to jarring when there are 4 targets. I’d wager that this could be more confusing or annoying if the list of targets runs off the screen, which on a smartphone might be like 6-8 targets? That said, we need to weigh this against the finding from our trial with Muso of sorting the People list–we found that it did increase the likelihood that CHWs would visit households that otherwise would’ve been at the bottom of the alphabet and less visible in their interface. An ideal scenario in my view would be to make dynamic/alphabetical an option in config. If the MVP one just gets one choice, my vote would be for dynamic because the list of targets will tend to be much shorter than the list of tasks or people.
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Showing 2 out of 3 seems clear enough to me given the available space. The use of color helps, it’s more noticeable than the number and more clearly communicates, “you should look at this.”
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The numbers in the right end of the left hand sidebar, as well as the numbers for each CHW on the right side of the screen both seem too small to me. This may be partly an artifact of me looking at screenshots on the forum rather than actual screens, but I would consider increasing the size or/and contrast for numbers in the left sidebar. Two important points of context here:
- Our users have a relatively high rate of uncorrected or poorly corrected vision. We see them squinting and we’ve been thanked in the past for increasing size of some text.
- Our users are often outdoors and they’re looking at the numbers in the glare of the sun, so relatively low contrast grey on white is harder.
Again, I’m not looking at this on a normal screen so if this is consistent with the system elsewhere in the app, it might make sense. Play around with it, trust your judgement, and then we’ll do some user testing once a prototype is ready.
@Nicole_Orlowski thanks for the progress update. I am inclined to the count with goal mockup. I find it simple and easy to interpret. Choice of color is important consideration. We have seen how red, yellow (amber), green have been applied more globally (traffic lights, MUAC tape, etc). Does the choice of color follow a certain global standard?
Just wondering loud, would a supervisor be able to drill down to identify the CHWs who have not met certain goals to, for example, provide supportive supervision? Also, thinking more broadly, is there a chance that a progress metric might be affected by purging?
Good job!
Hi @simon the supervisor feature being released in v3.9 will allow for viewing of aggregate performance information of CHW’s. Supervisors will be able to see which individual CHWs are contributing to an aggregate metric. That is, who is high and low performing within that metric. We have added a couple of metric views to start and additional targets can be configured. We will need to learn about specific project use cases to configure the right targets for supervisors needs.
Related data is stored in a separate database once a document is submitted, so document purging does not affect metrics tracking.
Hi, as part of the v3.9 release, we are excited to announce the CHT’s improved supervisor view!
Targets can now be configured to be aggregated and synced to allow supervisors to view the progress of their health workers towards their goals. These new “aggregate” targets show an overview of all workers progress within their branch and can be selected to show each workers progress individually.
Thanks for the active Community conversation in helping to define this feature. We have some additional supervisor improvements in planning and will continue to provide updates and request feedback.