As the technical steward of Community Health Toolkit, we are committed to maintaining and advancing the Core Framework and to sharing resources to make building impactful community health apps easy and fun! Driven by this commitment and guided by the CHT’s community principles, we’re thrilled to announce the addition of our first reference application to the Community Health Toolkit.
Reference Apps are digital health apps that are built using the Core Framework. They highlight different use cases and workflows and can be implemented as is or used as a template for a developer to modify based on the program’s needs. For our first Reference App, we have focused on an Antenatal Care (ANC) workflow.
Out of the network of over 26,000 health workers supported by tools built on the Core Framework, 93% are trained on ANC workflows. The development of our ANC Reference App was led by a multidisciplinary team of designers, developers, and deployment teammates, and draws from our experience building antenatal care apps for partners in over 65 different health systems.
The ANC Reference App provides organizations with a template for structuring and organizing their app, it’s configuration code, and testing framework. It includes a foundation for forms like Pregnancy and Delivery, flexible data fields, and even analytics. It can be deployed as-is or customized for your unique context.
As part of this launch, we have also expanded the resources available for the Community Health Toolkit. First, we’ve launched a CHT documentation site, where we’ve begun a series of easy to follow tutorials, with more content to be added regularly. At this time, deploying our ANC Reference App is geared towards a team that has one or more software developers. Our vision is to continue to improve application development tools so that eventually teams without a developer can build their own community health apps too. Applications are built using a combination of JavaScript, JSON and XML, and configurations are deployed using a terminal. Our recommendation is that developers are supported by teammates who understand the needs of community health workers’, can spot the opportunities in their health system, and are trained in human-centered design.
We have also contributed an Initiation and Planning Guide where you can learn more about how to lay the groundwork for strong implementation.
We expect the ANC Reference App to be a key resource for our app-building community and we’d love to hear your questions and feedback. We look forward to continuing this conversation over on the recently launched Community Health Toolkit Forum!