Community Health Toolkit
MLC Vanguard | Created by Medic
The Community Health Toolkit (CHT) is a collection of free and open-source technologies; open-access design, technical, and implementer resources; and a community of practice designed to decrease the time and resources required to build full-featured and ready-to-scale digital health apps, unlocking new opportunities to improve patient care.
18,000,000 Lives Impacted
Over the last decade, Medic and the CHT have supported more than 120 digital community health initiatives, bringing learnings from each to our global community of practice. Apps powered by the CHT are currently leveraged in 15 countries across Africa and Asia and are used by nearly 40,000 health workers. Since its launch in 2018, apps built on the CHT have supported care delivered by health workers nearly 90 million times through in-app activities (as of Q3 2022).
As of mid-2022, CHT-based apps have been used to support nearly 15 million assessments of children under five years old, leading to nearly 9 million diagnoses and 4.3 referrals for escalated care. CHWs have completed nearly 2 million malnutrition screenings and over 1.1 childhood immunisation screenings while supported by a CHT-based app. More than 1.3 million pregnancies have been registered using CHT-based apps, with health workers tracking nearly 1.7 million postnatal care visits. Health workers have also been supported to counsel more than 500 thousand women on family planning, ensuring women have a say in when and how they build their families.
The Innovation
The Community Health Toolkit (CHT) is a global public good that supports health workers as they deliver care in reimagined health systems. The CHT supports extensive customization and makes it easier and faster to build more reliable, interoperable, and secure digital health apps rather than coding from scratch. The combination of a streamlined, yet powerfully flexible platform is what makes the CHT highly useful for advanced community health programs, which often have complex task management, decision support, and performance management needs.
Apps built using the CHT can support many languages, run offline first, and work with basic phones (via SMS), smartphones (via Android apps), tablets, and computers. App developers can define health system roles, permissions and reporting hierarchies, and leverage messaging, task and schedule management, decision support workflows, longitudinal person profiles, and analytics. While frontline teams use apps built on the CHT for doorstep care coordination, managers and decision-makers use tools for performance management of CHWs, continuous program impact monitoring and evaluation, and data-driven resource planning and population health management.
Implemented in
Kenya, Nepal, Philippines, India, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Republic of South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania- Zanzibar, Mali, Niger, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, and Togo.
Get in touch
Emily Michael, Chief Development Officer
About Medic
For over 10 years Medic has advanced equitable care and strengthened community health systems by building, innovating, applying, and scaling open-source, low-cost digital health tools in collaboration with communities, governments, and implementers. We envision a world in which health workers, caregivers, and individuals are supported as they provide and access care in their communities; universal health coverage is a reality; and health is a secured human right contributing to overall human well-being and flourishing.
We believe providing communities with sophisticated, human-centred technology is an effective tool on the path to achieving a more just world, where universal health coverage is a reality and health is a secured human right.
