Q3 2022 Report
introduction
Advancing Equitable Care with Our Partners
In Q3, we built relations with community health workers and other partners crucial in advancing healthcare. We also leveraged our long standing partnerships with D-Tree International and DataKind, and fostered a new partnership with CircleIT to leverage the impact of maximizing use of digital tools in providing care. We are excited to also announce our commitment of $3 million USD in-kind to The Global Fund’s 7th Replenishment! We look forward to collaborating with the global community to leverage the open source Community Health Toolkit to build sustainable community health information systems alongside community health workers.
We invite you to learn more about exciting product updates, our growing community, overall achievements and more.
our impact
In Q3, the CHT supported 5.71 million caring activities and 264 Community Health Workers (CHWs).
Medic and our partners supported a total of 5.71million caring activities in Q3 2022, bringing the total number of caring activities since monitoring began in 2014 to 88.8M.
37,543
Total CHT users
15
Countries with active CHT implementations
88.8M
All-time caring activities supported
5.71M
Caring activities this quarter
In Q3, health workers registered 58,800 households, 62,000 pregnancies, and maintained critical speed of care, including 96.70% of PNC visits on-time and 83.50% of under-five child assessments within 72 hours.
62,000
Pregnancies registered
93.5
% of deliveries in a facility
960,000
Under-5 assessments
83.5
% of under-5 assessments conducted within 72 hours
product highlights
User-Centric Features - Living Our Value of Solidarity
In Q2, Medic delivered the Bulk User Upload API in CHT 3.15, paving the way for a truly user-centric feature in CHT 3.16 which shipped in Q3. The bulk user upload feature in the admin section allows CHT Admins to easily create from tens to thousands of users in a single click:
When CHT administrators couple this feature with previously existing Magic Links, passwords can be easily and securely delivered via SMS directly to the mobile device where the CHT App is installed. This means a single CHT Administrator can create 1,000s of accounts, and also ensure devices are seamlessly prepared to immediately equip CHWs.
Another administrator-facing feature is the ability to translate the UI for administrators. While the CHT has long supported languages for CHW-facing workflows, administrators will now also find the comfort and ease of their preferred language in their local CHT instance:
To support new phone numbers in Nepal, where Medic has a large SMS based deployment, CHT 3.16 added support for the latest Nepali phone numbers to ensure all numbers are valid when editing and creating contacts.
CHT Round-Up calls
Every month, our team organizes an opportunity for ALL to learn, share, and pose questions on the progress and actions taken to build a robust community of health advocates as well features and releases on the CHT Core Framework. Click through to read updates from each of Q3’s Round-Up calls.
FROM THE COMMUNITY
Partnering to Expand Documentation for Key CHT Capabilities
Contributions from the global CHT community are critical to the growth of global digital public goods and distilling learnings from past and present projects. Medic is proud to act as steward of the CHT community, which is strengthened each day by committed teams around the world.
In Q3, Medic leveraged our longstanding partnership with D-tree International to develop and document the first version of a CHT based Supervisor Reference Application, the supervisor reference app has been designed to enable supervisors to continually monitor, mentor and support CHWs to provide quality community health services. The reference app provides an example app that CHT App Developers can easily customize to meet the needs for their specific program areas to support CHW program management.
Since 2018, Medic and I-TECH teams have collaborated to design and develop a two-way texting app to support male circumcision follow up, building upon, studying, and expanding CHT’s existing capabilities to support building of direct to patient workflows between healthcare providers and patients. Together, the teams are finalizing documenting a guide for implementing direct to patient workflows and the application source code of the VMMC app will also be released. The direct messaging workflow documentation will serve as a great way for CHT community app developers and implementers to learn how they can build direct to patient workflows and incorporate the workflows as part of their own community health interventions.
program updates
Strengthening capacities and building partnerships in Kenya
As part of Medic’s commitment towards the sustainable national adoption of Kenya’s CHT-based electronic community health information system (eCHIS), we hosted a series of Tech Hackathon workshops throughout Q3. Representatives and leaders from MoH Kenya, Lwala Community Alliance, CMMB, Amref, Medtronic Labs, Living Goods, and JSI) were just some of the partners present who championed their dedication to the digitization of community health services and workforce in Kenya.
We commend MoH Kenya’s leadership’s commitment to the process of ensuring stakeholder participation, alignment with digitization vision & national architecture framework, strategies, policies and legal framework.
Alongside MoH and a coalition of partners, Medic is supporting the completion of design and configuration of eCHIS 2.0 CHV workflows, finalizing eCHIS architecture, design, and development documentaries, as well as planning of testing and quality assurance for configured workflows. The project is on course for eCHIS 2.0 scale up in Q4 2022.
Technical training and capacity building in Mali
In Ségou, Mali, the Medic team continued our support of the national scale of CHT-based DISC-Mali by conducting a training of trainers (ToT) with more than 30 people from MoH Mali and other stakeholders involved in community health. Medic developed training tools and a DISC-Mali user guide that will serve as support for training stakeholders in the regions, districts and health areas. The training of CHWs will be done with the technical support of Medic teammates in the coming months and will greatly relieve community actors in providing care within the community.
As part of the ToT session, the team focused on a participatory training methodology through role plays, working in groups, and co-presentation sessions while ensuring the focus was on the needs of the CHWs. From the session, there was ample commitment by the participants and the trainers felt ready to train by themselves.
There were also initial demonstrations made by identified participants who had their first contact with the App. Some feedback from the CHWs present included;
‘The CHT is a tool that I appreciate very much and that can help our health workers a lot. I found it practical and easy to handle’
Another user commented on the CHT;
‘It is an excellent tool. It will facilitate the life of the CHWs and considerably improve the CHW program and consequently contribute to the reduction of morbidity in children and pregnant and postpartum women’
research initiatives
Uganda MoH Capacity Building on Data Quality
In collaboration with DataKind, Medic Lab’s data integrity work has launched a research initiative that sets out to foster decision-maker’s confidence in data collected by community health workers.
Good quality data will drive innovations such as precision public health. To achieve the data quality improvement objective of the collaboration, Medic and DataKind developed the Data Observation Toolkit (DOT). Version 1.0 of DOT was released this quarter. Out of the box, version 1.0 of DOT provides 160 inconsistent or problematic (IoP) data tests across 10 test types and supports the taxonomy of the tests based on 23 scenarios and six workflow-based categories. In Q3, we provided four remote capacity-building sessions for six Uganda Ministry of Health data scientists and statisticians. The MoH staff who were trained as trainers have since embarked on capacity-building for their colleagues. Looking ahead, we will complete the development of a sample dashboard for DOT, open source DOT in line with the requirements to register it as a digital public good and develop the support for persona-driven remediation of data quality issues.
Hot off the press – new publications from Medic teammates
In September, we donated 177 mobile phones to the Medic-supported CMMB program based in Kitui County, Kenya. This donation was successful due to the burgeoning partnership with CircleIT – a B Corporation based in Oklahoma City, USA. Read more of the day’s events and the dreams of CHVs here. |
Medic’s Ugandan teammates Brian Ssennoga and Joviah Tuhaise contributed to the UNCDF digital white paper dubbed “Investing in Digitalizing healthcare: The UNCDF way”. The paper provides a lens at the UNCDF digital ‘Leaving no one behind in the digital era’ strategy which is supporting the growth of an inclusive digital economy with a focus on key sectors, including the health sector. |
Our service delivery team is our main point of contact with community health workers (CHWs). Through them, we are able to build tools that directly address the needs of our CHWs. Read more in our Q&A with Jane Katanu, Service Design Manager.
INTERNAL NEWS
A Return to In-Person Global Engagements
In Q3, Medic teammates around the world had the opportunity to meet and interact with one another and our partners. Members of our leadership went on a field visit in Nepal where they engaged with FHCV’s at the Thumpakhar health post in Sindhupalchok district. The team also had important conversations with key members around our work on Nursing and Social Security Division (NSSD) that highlighted the wins and some early challenges that partners worked through.
We were excited to be part of the global community that came together for #UNGA77. We re-instated our commitment to building world-class tools that will provide efficiency to CHWs providing care in hard to reach communities. We also showed our support through committing $3M towards The Global Fund’s 7th replenishment! We look forward to collaborating with the global community to leverage the open source Community Health Toolkit to build sustainable community health information systems alongside community health workers.
Together with D-Tree, we penned our thoughts and highlighted three approaches we believe should be central in getting us closer to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 3: Good Health and Wellbeing.
NEW TEAM MEMBERS
Esther Moturi
Technical Writer