Discover what CHT app developers have to say about their experiences, the resources they rely on, and how we’re continuously improving the Community Health Toolkit to better meet their needs.
In the last few years, the Community Health Toolkit’s vibrant community has grown to 26 local and global partners. At Medic we’ve been continuously developing, adapting and refining a range of resources to accommodate and inspire this burgeoning number of developers as they build CHT apps.
Twice a year, Medic surveys app developers to better understand their experience with the CHT. In keeping with our human-centered design approach, and our value of openness, we channel the feedback – both positive and constructive – into making sure the CHT meets their needs.
Who did we speak to?
In December 2023, we received feedback from 28 CHT app developers across 11 different organizations – of which 24 had more than six months’ experience developing CHT applications. This is valuable, as respondents with more experience can provide more accurate and detailed feedback.
Which CHT resources do developers use?
The CHT Documentation site provides comprehensive and up-to-date information for building CHT apps. It has become a primary resource for the CHT community, with more than 96% of survey respondents saying they use it to develop their applications.
More than 78% also reported using the CHT Forum. This is a space for designers, developers, program managers, and innovators to share knowledge, provide technical assistance to other users, and explore new opportunities for learning and collaboration.
It is exciting to see that the CHT Academy is now one of the core resources developers are turning to, despite being launched just over a year ago.
CHT resources: What do developers think?
Now the question arises, how well do these resources support CHT application building?
To answer it, we asked participants to rate the level of difficulty across different stages of app building. Their responses show that the majority of developers find most stages of CHT app development to be easy – but not for all. The distribution of responses, with averages indicated by white square boxes, are shown below.
What are we improving?
As steward of the Community Health Toolkit, one of our goals is to build world-class, open-source software to support better health outcomes. This is only possible with first-rate resources to support developers.
Less than 50% of participants felt that the existing CHT resources are sufficient to build CHT applications. So, we captured some feedback to figure out where the pain points are.
Imran Esmail from D-tree suggested that CHT resources could be improved “by making the CHT Academy the go-to site for learning any new CHT concept. At the moment, the Academy site has very few courses.”
We are directing our efforts into doing exactly that.
We are developing more courses, including one on Site Reliability Engineering, which we aim to have live before the end of 2024. We will also be updating and enhancing our existing courses with recent CHT feature releases.
We also regularly share reference applications, which can be an immense support to the CHT community to understand and adapt similar workflows. We added documentation for two new reference apps to the CHT site, with their source code openly available at Github:
- Pharmacovigilance Reference app: This focuses on the detection, assessment, understanding, and prevention of adverse effects and other potential drug-related problems.
- Direct-to-client (D2C), two-way texting (2wT) workflows on CHT: These assist in addressing the health needs of clients by connecting them with healthcare providers at the facility- or community-level.
Franklyne Kembo from Brink Innovation requested “shorter versions for deployment that are step-by-step” and “video tutorials for the same.”
We hope to address this through a new webinar series we launched. Targeted at technical partners, it provides community members with an opportunity to learn and share on a technical topic of choice. After the first two on CHT Telemetry and CHT Test Harness saw excellent turnouts and engagement, we have decided to hold them quarterly.
We are continuously working on supporting developers, enhancing each and every CHT resource to strengthen the whole community. Hearing feedback like George’s below motivates us to do even more:
