Community health workers (CHWs) can play a critical role in rural regions of low-income countries. People living in extreme poverty often delay seeking care until it is too late for them to be helped. CHWs are often in the best position to promote preventive care, ensure safe pregnancy, and monitor population health. To provide effective care, however, CHWs need to track a great deal of data about each family and provide a broad range of health services. They often receive limited training and have high staff turnover. Thus it is important to develop tools to support CHWs as they deliver care, as well as improve supervision and data collection of CHW programs.

We are currently developing software called CommCare to aid CHWs. CommCare will provide support for CHWs to manage a household visit, plan their day, and explore aggregate data to compare their performance with others in their country. CommCare will guide the CHW to screen household members for illnesses such as TB or Mal!aria, and provide advice on safe water practices, family planning, etc as well as allowing them to register any births or deaths that have occurred since the last visit. CommCare will help a CHW plan their day by providing follow up reminders. For example, if a member of a household is referred for a TB test, CommCare can direct the CHW to follow up on that household after 1 week. Finally, CHWs will be able to explore trends in their data, and compare their activity to those of other CHWs in the district, region and country. CommCare will help a CHW organize activities and will recommend tasks, but leave control of what to do to the CHW.