HMS Notifier manages programs, recipients and their subscriptions to each program. A program is a series of messages that should be delivered to a recipient over a period of time. For example, a nine-month program could be developed that delivers informational or supportive messages on a weekly basis throughout an expectant monther's pregnancy. The notifier manages subscriptions that feed into the HMS Hub.
This software was developed to support objectives outlined in the CCPF program.
The VillageReach CCPF program, CHIPATALA CHA PA FONI, means "Health Center by Phone" in the Malawian language of Chichewa. The program is focused on maternal & child health improvement, through increased access to basic health information, and prompting towards earlier interaction with the health system. The program has two components: a toll-free hotline for pregnancy & infant health advice and referrals, and a health-tip messaging system, which pushes SMS and voice messages out to rural clients who have been enrolled in the tips system. The program enjoyed a successful pilot over 2 years, from 2011-2013, handling hundreds of callers per week, and is now in the process of expanding its reach.
The software used by the hotline workers to record caller interaction is mnch-hotline, developed by the Malawian health-software company Baobab Health Trust. The software to handle the tips-message distribution, HMS-Hub, and HMS-Notifier, were developed by VillageReach. All components are in active production use in Malawi.
The tips-messaging system is designed to operate robustly in a environment with intermittent connectivity, and multiple remote messaging sources. The Hub software is intended to be on a relatively better-connected server. It centralizes handling of all the message-delivery gateways (SMS, IVR, email, etc) and serves as a capable store-and-forward. Each authorized instance of the Notifier software connects to the Hub periodically to issue a new set of message requests, and receive data on message-attempt results. Both apps expect an unreliable Hub-Notifier connection, and to a lesser extent, an unreliable connection between the Hub and its messaging gateways. The Hub also handles its own retries of failed messages, for when the gateway does not.
In production practice, in Malawi, the Hub is in a telco server room, on the telco's network connection. The currently single Notifier instance on the hotline server, located in a rural district hospital, where the hotline workers have local oversight in the pilot program. The Notifier connects via a USB dongle, over a private APN on the telco's 2G network. The software handles regular downtime between those servers, and the Hub handles SMS and voice messages that often take multiple retries to reach customer phones, which are often out of range or powered down.
It is assumed that you have ruby version 1.9.3, are using bundler and have the necessary mysql headers to compile the mysql2
gem.
git clone git://github.com/dhedlund/hms-notifier.git hms-notifier
cd hms-notifier
bundle install
bundle exec rake db:create db:schema:load db:seed
bundle exec rails s -blocalhost
bundle exec rake test # all tests
bundle exec rake test:units # unit tests
bundle exec rake test:functionals # functional/controller tests
TEST=test/unit/notification_test.rb bundle exec rake test # single test file