Authors: Samuel Mbuthia and Antony Khaemba
As steward of the CHT, Medic shares our values of humanity, openness, and solidarity with the community-at-large. We continually seek new ways to meet and connect with our partners in a mostly-virtual environment, to share critical product updates, and to learn from one another through collaborative, ongoing conversations.
To this end, in December 2021, Medic hosted the first CHT Community Round-up – the start of a series of monthly calls to engage the community, share product news, and open the floor for valuable, direct feedback to our team.
We have since tweaked and evolved these Round-ups to incorporate more community member voices to ensure each call remains relevant and engaging for attendees. In the last three months, we introduced several segments designed to deliver impactful learnings, updates, and highlight opportunities for community members to partner together for greater impact.
Stories from the community
What started as testimonials on how Medic’s partners have applied CHT Core Framework features to their own projects has now evolved into community members sharing interesting stories about the innovative work they are leading, aided by the CHT. This segment was informed by the many inspiring conversations and forum discussions initiated by the community and our belief that these stories should be amplified and shared with a wider audience. In January’s Round-up the Palladium Kenya team shared their learnings and experience deploying AfyaSTAT in a fully offline environment and the I-TECH team presented their two-way texting (2WT) intervention in Malawi, South Africa and Zimbabwe. In the March Round-up, D-tree presented Jamii ni Afya’s integration with DHIS2 in Zanzibar.
Learn more about how the community is leveraging the CHT around the world
CHT Community Stories – AfyaSTAT fully offline setup
CHT Community Stories – Two way texting system
CHT Community stories- Jamii ni Afya by D-tree
New releases and upcoming initiatives
CHT Core Framework releases come with new features, enhanced features, bug fixes, and more. The CHT Round-up calls are an opportunity for community members to receive first-hand context about each improvement, ask questions, and see live demos of new features in action. Along with new releases, Medic will also provide sneak peeks into future releases so that community members know what’s coming up next on the roadmap and how to best plan and prepare to use the new features.
Optimizing the CHT
The Medic teams working on the CHT Core Framework aim to listen and learn from our partners and end users – those who use the software in practice each day. We do this by scheduling “interviews” with end users to learn how they are using the app, what works well, and what needs improvement. We also conduct usability tests with CHWs, Supervisors, App Developers, and others to validate our assumptions on how users will interact with a feature before we build anything. If you would like to help out by connecting us with end users, please reach out!
Community member spotlights
Community spotlights offer an opportunity for members to present a profile of their organization and discuss partnership opportunities with other community members. Over the last quarter, we have heard from a variety of talented organizations such as Totohealth, KoeKoe Tech, SunyaEk, and the International Training & Education for Health’s Digital Initiative Group (I-TECH DIGI) who are collectively representing populations from a number of countries including Kenya, Myanmar, and Nepal. We are inspired by the globally representative community, a collective group of individuals and organizations seeking one common goal: to improve the lives of those most in need.
- Totohealth is a social enterprise, founded in 2015 with a vision to reduce maternal and child health mortality. They currently serve over 220,000 mothers in eight municipalities in Kenya and have identified the CHT as a platform that will help them scale their impact.
- KoeKoe Tech is an organization with a talented team of developers and designers that are looking to partner with other community members to build CHT applications for impact.
- SunyaEk is a health information technology organization based in Nepal that supports the Nepal MoHP and nonprofit organizations deploy open source tools. The organization has supported the deployment of Bhamni/OpenMRS in Nepal and they currently have an ongoing partnership with Possible Health.
- I-TECH DIGI builds on 15 years of experience designing, developing, implementing, and evaluating health information systems (HIS) around the world. The group is currently exploring using CHT for two way texting intervention to support HIV treatment adherence and non clinical case management.
Get involved
We continue to seek community members who wish to speak about and share their work. If you would like to participate in a Round-up call or speak with our team, in these efforts, please reach out via the forum.
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Your feedback will help us improve the CHT Community Round-ups and better support all community members who engage with the CHT.