Supporting variable target goals for different contexts

[bernard]

Your organization: Medic Mobile

What other organizations would benefit from this: Implementing / Technical

Describe the feature:

We are working on designing improvements to the CHT’s targets feature and we love to hear from you.

The focus is on the ability to make the target goal variable. Currently, the goal is specified as a constant value that applies across the users of that target. Conceptually, this enhancement should take into account factors that characterize the different contexts within a single deployment and to allow setting up different target goals for the different users in those different contexts. How does this resonate with you?

1. Do you have a pain point touching on this? For example, needing different target goals for different users, groups of users, etc. We would like to hear about it.
2. Do you envision or have a workflow that could capitalize on varying target goals and how would or do you go about the programmatic implementation of it?
3. Any programmatic considerations that would touch on this that we can learn from?
4. Have you implemented in one way or another something similar to this? Please share examples.

There are four ways of looking at this at the moment that could translate to phased improvements. We would like to factor in needs on the ground coupled with real-life circumstances early on in the design process. I am listing those here to help with brainstorming so please feel free to entertain ideas beyond what is listed below.

• Varying target goals for community health workers as informed by demographic, population differences as well as data points collected in the app that is specific to the community health workers’ catchment areas.
• Ability for supervisors and program managers to be able to set target goals themselves for community health workers and supervisors respectively from the app.
• Being able to set target goals that update depending on what time or period of the year it is.
• Ability to dynamically calculate using the information available in the app, what the target goal should be over a given period of time.

[bernard]

This features quite a bit in the Supervisor CHW Performance Monitoring discussion. @hhornung you specifically provide some good context in your comment

@hhornung

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.

I am interested to hear more of your thoughts and the initial thinking here and if it aligns with your vision.

[hhornung]

Hi Bernard,

Sorry for the long silence, I lost track of this thread during the last weeks. The following two ideas you suggest resonate very well with me and some of our thinking in one of our programs:

@bernard

• Varying target goals for community health workers as informed by demographic, population differences as well as data points collected in the app that is specific to the community health workers’ catchment areas.
• Ability for supervisors and program managers to be able to set target goals themselves for community health workers and supervisors respectively from the app.

Regarding the data points collected in the app that is specific to the community health workers’ catchment areas I would make explicit that this could be data points in the CHV’s or supervisor’s person or place documents. A concrete example here is that we would like to test an intervention with some CHVs in two of the districts we are active. The program would benefit from a possibility to give these different goals for the runtime of the intervention.

An additional idea/potential requirement is to have whole targets only for certain groups. For example, cholera might be an issue only in certain districts, and warrant a target in these districts, but not in others. This could also be realized by setting the goal to 0 in districts where this is not relevant, but this might require some communication/explanation to CHVs.
Additionally