Customizing and improving medical workflows using ODK survey

Abstract

Open Data Kit (ODK) has been a successful data collection platform for many organizations; however, some users have struggled to adapt their use case to JavaRosa's XForm standard. In this paper we describe a new questionnaire-rendering tool (named Survey) that expands ODK's toolkit to support complex and highly adaptable workflows. Survey improves an organization's ability to build customized domain specific applications by providing interactive, non-linear navigation capability and question widgets defined in JavaScript/HTML; thereby, enabling runtime customizable navigation and question data types. To verify that Survey can simplify the creation of complex workflows, we present a case study that implements the World Health Organization's Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) customized for field deployments in Ghana and India.