Zambia has been challenged by several social and healthcare problems for years and decades now. Gradually, organizations have tried meddling into these predicaments and created solutions to improve the quality of living, especially with healthcare.

Deemed as one of the major crisis in the country, maternal and child mortality was given focus by the recent development of distributed health data capture system by Better Health Outcomes for Zambia, also known as BHOMA. They did this by standardizing and centralizing interventions via rural clinics and community health workers (CHW) in Zambia. This venture is a depiction of how the country lags in technological advancement with extremely limited internet connection, frequent power interruption and scarcity in computer units.

This project equipped a health worker in each community clinic with a cell phone. This will be their tool to communicate any healthcare scenarios, timely inputting of patient’s information and getting back to the clinic to monitor patient outcomes.

With the challenge of having technology gaps, BHOMA became tapped CouchDB to do the job for them. CouchDB makes web applications writing easy and simple that spans from as minute as using smartphone to as large scale as with datacenter maintenance. Their synchronization engine allows data and programs to be fairly shared athwart ad-hoc clusters.

With network outages as one of the main obstacle, CouchDB works at its optimum with fully offline network. What needs to be done is to ensure that a lightweight server is set into place and power is there. With this combination transport of information within clinics and outcome monitoring are assured. This communication flow operates under the concept of continuous replication that allows CouchDB to optimize synchronization, so that writing sync protocols would not be an issue. Filtered imitation or replication enabled each clinic to send data to the correct clinic with a significant reduction in bandwidth requirements for each clinic and the server.

Results have been very favorable so far. They even got some extra benefits out of it. BHOMA initially uses CouchDB to just store data. Now, it is also being used to capture and monitor the activities within local clinics.

CouchDB has gained solid following and popularity over time as its model fits almost all existing domains with lesser complexity. Their chief propeller is JSON HTTP API—without requiring a middle tier, develops are able to write database-backed applications.