A digital public good including open-source software and open-access resources to help partners design and deploy digital health apps for community health systems and frontline health workers.
Skoll Award of Social Entrepreneurship, Global Citizen Accelerate Award, GAVI INFUSE, Pacesetter Laureate of the Tech of Global Good, Fast Forward Accelerator
Half of the world's population cannot obtain essential health services because doctors, nurses, and facilities are either inaccessible, unaffordable, or under-resourced. These health system failures drive millions of annual deaths and incalculable morbidity, but software and new models of doorstep care can make a difference. System strengthening and system change are needed at unprecedented scale to ensure people can access the care they need and deserve.
Medic serves as technical steward and core contributor of the CHT. The CHT is the only fully-open, human-centered, scalable digital solution that is designed specifically for last mile health delivery. It is a free and open-source digital public good, without licensing or per-user fees. Apps built with the CHT support many languages, run offline-first, work with feature phones (via SMS), smartphones (via Android apps), tablets, and computers and contain five highly configurable areas of functionality: messaging, task and schedule management, decision support workflows, longitudinal person profiles, and analytics. Key user groups include Community Health Workers (CHWs), frontline supervisors, facility-based nurses, health system managers, and patients and caregivers.
Medic designs solutions for complex use cases and health systems with the voice of the end-user included throughout the process (often user groups with historically low literacy rates and minimal exposure to advanced technology). Digital health apps must also support health systems in a wide range of low-infrastructure environments. Apps built with the CHT Core Framework are designed to be offline-first and work with limited internet connections, enabling health workers to carry out important duties even when opportunities to sync their devices may be weeks apart.
Digital health apps built with the CHT are deployed in 15 countries in Africa and Asia and support more than 40,000 health workers. Collectively, this cadre of frontline health workers has used CHT-based digital health apps to perform 85M+ caring activities in the communities since 2014. The largest health worker networks currently supported by the CHT are in Kenya, Nepal, and Uganda, each with approximately 10,000 active app users.
Where there is interest, political will, and available resources, Medic and the CHT are prepared to support any Ministry of Health, technical organization, and/or implementing agency working to advance community-based health systems.