As technical steward of the Community Health Toolkit (CHT), Medic is dedicated to ensuring a thriving global community of practice is empowered to independently build, modify, sustain, and scale CHT-based apps enabling high-quality, equitable care for communities around the world. We are committed to continuous improvement driven directly from our community, and are pleased to launch our latest CHT Developer Survey.
Feedback from previous surveys in April 2021, December 2021, July 2022, and December 2022 has served as a catalyst, propelling us to delve deeper into documentation and resource sharing and shaping how we support CHT app developers.
In our latest survey, 70% of the respondents had more than 6 months of experience in developing CHT applications, illustrating the wealth of expertise within our community.
However, 50% of the survey respondents reported that the CHT resources available at the time were not fully sufficient to support developers to build CHT applications.
Bolstered by our commitment to continuous improvement, we explored the sufficiency of existing resources for CHT application development. Drawing from the valuable feedback provided in the previous survey conducted in July, we diligently incorporated additional documentation, amplifying the quality and accessibility of our existing resources.
Our learnings and next steps
According to the survey results, a majority of respondents did not find it difficult to develop CHT applications, but expressed that there was some level of difficulty in creating an external dashboard and integrating the CHT with other systems. Our team is working on making the process easier. In a similar context, we recently shared some updates on ongoing work on CHT interoperability. While integration requires custom development to connect two systems, interoperability allows different health systems and applications to communicate or exchange data easily. If you are interested in learning more about CHT interoperability, we encourage you to look into multiple resources from our team; Interoperability, Interoperability in Digital Healthcare, Interoperability with the CHT, and CHT Interoperability with FHIR. We will be sharing more updates in the coming months.
Also, from the survey, we noticed that a critical number of CHT App developers are using Windows as an operating system (OS). To make our resources more inclusive for all OS, our team is planning to update the CHT documentation website in near future to include detailed support for Windows users.
In more exciting news, we are proud to have successfully launched the CHT Academy which includes courses on building CHT applications. We anticipate that the academy will compliment previously existing resources and offer robust support to our community of developers. We will continue to monitor the usefulness of the resources in future surveys. We also have high level functional documentation on muting now available on the CHT documentation website.
We continue to empower our developers and nurture an environment of excellence as we remain steadfast in our mission to ensure that the resources available for CHT application development are nothing short of exceptional. Feedback from our community members continues to be very valuable to us. It helps us improve the CHT experience. Please keep sending the feedback in by filling the survey below.
If you’d like to discuss this on the CHT community forum, here’s the associated post.