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Draft:CommCare

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CommCare
DeveloperDimagi
Written inPython, Java
Operating systemAndroid; web-based server
TypeMobile data collection, case management, mHealth
LicenseBSD-3-Clause (CommCare HQ); Apache 2.0 (mobile)
Websitecommcare.dimagi.com
Repositorygithub.com/dimagi/commcare-hq

CommCare is an open-source platform for building offline-capable mobile applications for data collection, case management, and decision support, developed by Dimagi.[1] Applications are built without programming in CommCare HQ, a web-based server that also stores and manages the data collected on phones.[1][2] It is used mainly by community health workers in low- and middle-income countries, but also in research, agriculture, and international development.[3] Several governments use it as the platform for national health information systems,[4][5][6] and in 2020 it was used for COVID-19 contact tracing by health departments in the United States.[7][8] The Digital Public Goods Alliance has listed CommCare as a digital public good since 2021.[9]

History

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Dimagi was founded by Jonathan Jackson and Vikram Kumar, who met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002. In early consulting projects in Africa and India they built a drag-and-drop form builder, and around 2008 the company began focusing on tools for frontline and community workers. Its software has been open source from the start.[1]

Features

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CommCare applications are built in CommCare HQ, either with a web-based form builder or by uploading a form defined in an Excel spreadsheet,[10] and run on Android phones and tablets.[4] Forms can record timestamps, GPS coordinates, images, audio, and video, and support calculations, local languages, and skip logic that chooses the next question based on earlier answers.[11][10] Instructional audio and video can be built into applications to guide health workers with low digital literacy through clinical protocols.[6]

Applications work offline: data is saved on the device and sent to the server automatically when a network connection becomes available.[11] Case management lets users register a person, such as a patient or pregnant woman, as a case and follow them across repeated visits and forms.[10][11] Data can also be submitted by SMS.[12]

CommCare HQ is used to manage mobile workers and monitor their use of the application, and provides reports, dashboards, and access permissions that can be set by location.[10][11] Data can be exported to CSV or Excel files or accessed through an application programming interface,[10][11] and has been connected to analytics tools and health information systems including Tableau, Power BI, and DHIS2.[11][4][13]

CommCare HQ is written in Python and released under the BSD-3-Clause license; the Android application is written in Java and released under the Apache License 2.0.[2][14]

Two scoping reviews of surveillance software found that CommCare met more of their criteria than most tools assessed: it was one of four out of 30 tools covering 14 of 15 attributes in a 2021 review,[3] and one of three tools meeting all 10 criteria in a 2023 review.[12]

Use

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Early deployments

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In Bihar, India, CommCare was adapted into a maternal and child health application under a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation project; more than 550 frontline workers in one district were trained to use it from July 2012.[10] By 2020, according to MIT News, more than half a million workers in India were using CommCare-based tools.[1]

2014 Ebola response

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During the West African Ebola epidemic, the Earth Institute, the United Nations Population Fund, and Guinea's National Coordination Unit deployed a CommCare contact tracing application starting in November 2014.[15] By April 2015, 210 contact tracers in five prefectures were using it to monitor 9,162 contacts, alongside the existing paper system.[11] The system flagged contacts who had not yet been visited and recorded a timestamp and GPS coordinates with each visit, so supervisors could check contact tracers' work.[11]

2020 COVID-19 response

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In 2020 several US state, city, and tribal health departments adopted CommCare for COVID-19 case investigation and contact tracing. The San Francisco Department of Public Health, the University of California, San Francisco, and Dimagi built a CommCare-based tool that the city used from April to November 2020.[7] New York State began using CommCare in May 2020 to standardize contact tracing across its counties. County health departments reported mixed experiences with the transition.[8] In New Jersey, an executive order signed on 12 May 2020 directed the state to set up a centralized contact tracing platform for local health departments,[16] and the state launched CommCare statewide in early July 2020.[17] Governor Phil Murphy described it as a database rather than a tracking app, saying it did not use geolocation data.[18] The State of Alaska adopted CommCare to document COVID-19 investigations,[19] and contact tracers in the Navajo Nation began using it in May 2020 for case investigation, case management, and referrals to services.[20]

Outside the United States, Burkina Faso added COVID-19 screening, counseling, and training modules to its existing CommCare application and deployed them to primary health care facilities within three weeks.[6]

National health information systems

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Several ministries of health use CommCare as the platform for national digital tools for primary and community health workers. In Burkina Faso, the Ministry of Health and Terre des hommes built a CommCare-based decision-support application for the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness strategy. The program grew from a pilot in one district in 2010 to more than 1,700 rural primary health care facilities, where 6,300 health workers use the application.[6] In 2021 the ministry also selected CommCare as the digital platform for the country's community health workers and their supervisors.[21] Ethiopia's national electronic community health information system (eCHIS) is built on CommCare.[4] In Benin, the Ministry of Health's AlafiaComm platform is built on CommCare. The ministry chose it to align with its commitment to CommCare for community health, and since 2024 has used it to run health campaigns such as seasonal malaria chemoprevention, replacing tools run by outside partners.[5] In Mozambique, the upSCALE applications used by community health workers are built on CommCare, with their data visualized in DHIS2 at district, provincial, and national levels.[13] A 2021 study of digital health tools reaching national scale in South Africa found that donor preferences played a significant role in the selection of CommCare to digitize community health worker data, with a focus on HIV and tuberculosis.[22]

See also

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References

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  1. 1 2 3 4 Winn, Zach (8 March 2020). "A mobile tool for global change". MIT News. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  2. 1 2 "dimagi/commcare-hq". GitHub. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  3. 1 2 Silenou, Bernard C.; Nyirenda, John L. Z.; Zaghloul, Ahmed; Lange, Berit; Doerrbecker, Juliane; Schenkel, Karl; Krause, Gérard (2021). "Availability and Suitability of Digital Health Tools in Africa for Pandemic Control: Scoping Review and Cluster Analysis". JMIR Public Health and Surveillance. 7 (12) e30106. doi:10.2196/30106. PMC 8738990. PMID 34941551.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Mekuria, Legese A.; Likasa, Getaneh; Sintayehu, Temesgan; Mekonen, Leul; et al. (2026). "A User-Centered Approach to Achieving High Degree of Digital Health Technology Utilization for Community HIV Case Management and Data Collection in Ethiopia". Global Health: Science and Practice. 14 (1) e2400353. doi:10.9745/GHSP-D-24-00353. PMC 13455844. PMID 42303462.
  5. 1 2 Integrated Digitization of Health Campaigns, 2021–2025: Lessons from Benin, DRC, Kenya, and Nigeria (PDF) (Report). Clinton Health Access Initiative. November 2026. pp. 55, 61. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  6. 1 2 3 4 "CommCare in Burkina Faso: How an Existing App at Scale Was Adapted for COVID-19". Exemplars in Global Health. 2021. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  7. 1 2 Burgess, Hailey; Gutierrez-Mock, Luis; Ho, Yun-Xian; Moghadassi, Michelle; Lesh, Neal; Krueger, Elizabeth; Reid, Michael (2021). "Implementing a digital system for contact tracing and case investigation during COVID-19 pandemic in San Francisco: a qualitative study". JAMIA Open. 4 (4) ooab093. doi:10.1093/jamiaopen/ooab093. PMC 8653624. PMID 34888491.
  8. 1 2 Harris, Lissa; Pantuso, Phillip; Gilson, Roger Hannigan (12 June 2020). "Coronavirus Roundup: Contact Tracing Differs by County". Chronogram. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  9. ↑ "CommCare". Digital Public Goods Alliance Registry. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Balakrishnan, Ramkrishnan; Gopichandran, Vijayaprasad; Chaturvedi, Sharadprakash; Chatterjee, Rahul; Mahapatra, Tanmay; Chaudhuri, Indrajit (2016). "Continuum of Care Services for Maternal and Child Health using mobile technology – a health system strengthening strategy in low and middle income countries". BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making. 16 84. doi:10.1186/s12911-016-0326-z. PMC 4937606. PMID 27387548.
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Sacks, Jilian A.; Zehe, Elizabeth; Redick, Cindil; Bah, Alhoussaine; Cowger, Kai; Camara, Mamady; Diallo, Aboubacar; Gigo, Abdel Nasser Iro; Dhillon, Ranu S.; Liu, Anne (2015). "Introduction of Mobile Health Tools to Support Ebola Surveillance and Contact Tracing in Guinea". Global Health: Science and Practice. 3 (4): 646–659. doi:10.9745/GHSP-D-15-00207. PMC 4682588. PMID 26681710.
  12. 1 2 Wallis, Katherine; Mwangale, Vanessa; Gebre-Mariam, Mikael; Reid, Jenny; Jung, Julia (2023). "Software Tools to Facilitate Community-Based Surveillance: A Scoping Review". Global Health: Science and Practice. 11 (5) e2200553. doi:10.9745/GHSP-D-22-00553. PMC 10615241. PMID 37903572.
  13. 1 2 Feldman, Mitra; Lacey Krylova, Vera; Farrow, Poppy; Donovan, Laura; et al. (2021). "Community health worker knowledge, attitudes and practices towards COVID-19: Learnings from an online cross-sectional survey using a digital health platform, UpSCALE, in Mozambique". PLOS ONE. 16 (2) e0244924. Bibcode:2021PLoSO..1644924F. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0244924. PMC 7875419. PMID 33566850.
  14. ↑ "dimagi/commcare-android". GitHub. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  15. ↑ Kaba, Mariama Siré (5 January 2015). "Mobile app promises to speed Ebola response in Guinea". United Nations Population Fund. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  16. ↑ "Executive Order No. 141" (PDF). State of New Jersey. 12 May 2020. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  17. ↑ "New Jersey Department of Health Launches Contact Tracing Dashboard" (Press release). New Jersey Department of Health. 7 August 2020. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  18. ↑ "N.J. Governor Promises to Safeguard Contact Tracing Data". Government Technology. 11 June 2020. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  19. ↑ Jardin, Matt (30 June 2020). "UAA offers contact tracing certification as COVID-19 cases climb". University of Alaska Anchorage. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  20. ↑ Allen, Krista (10 February 2022). "'A wild ride': Reining in the virus, contact tracers fight fear, COVID-19". Navajo Times. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  21. ↑ "Burkina Faso Advances on Road to Digitized Health System". Living Goods. 30 March 2021. Retrieved 9 November 2026.
  22. ↑ Swartz, Alison; LeFevre, Amnesty E.; Perera, Shehani; Kinney, Mary V.; George, Asha S. (2021). "Multiple pathways to scaling up and sustainability: an exploration of digital health solutions in South Africa". Globalization and Health. 17 (1) 77. doi:10.1186/s12992-021-00716-1. PMC 8259085. PMID 34229699.
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Category:Free health care software Category:Mobile software Category:MHealth Category:Information and communication technologies for development

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