TABLE 1.
MediCapt Development Process Compared With Principles for Digital Development Benchmarks
| Principles for Digital Development16 | MediCapt Development Process |
|---|---|
| Design with the user | |
| Develop context-appropriate solutions informed by user needs | ✓ |
| Include all user groups in planning, development, implementation, and assessment | ✓ |
| Develop projects in incremental and iterative manner | ✓ |
| Design solutions that learn from and enhance existing workflows, and plan for organizational adaptation | ✓ |
| Ensure solutions are sensitive to, and useful for, the most marginalized populations: women, children, those with disabilities, and those affected by conflict and disaster | ✓ |
| Understand the ecosystem | |
| Participate in networks and communities of like-minded practitioners | ✓ |
| Align existing technological, legal, and regulatory policies | ✓ |
| Design for scale | |
| Design for scale from the start, and assess and mitigate dependencies that might limit ability to scale | ✓ |
| Employ a systems approach to design, considering implications of design beyond an immediate project | ✓ |
| Be replicable and customizable in other countries and contexts | Planned |
| Demonstrate impact before scaling a solution | In process |
| Analyze all technology choices through the lens of national and regional scale | ✓ |
| Factor in partnerships from the beginning, and start early negotiations | ✓ |
| Build for sustainability | |
| Plan for sustainability from the start, including planning for long-term financial health | In process |
| Utilize and invest in local communities and developers by default, and help catalyze their growth | Not done |
| Engage with local governments to ensure integration into national strategy, and identify high-level government advocates | ✓ |
| Be data driven | |
| Design projects so that impact can be measured at discrete milestones with a focus on outcomes rather than outputs | In process |
| Evaluation innovative solutions and areas where there are gaps in data and evidence | ✓ |
| Use real-time information to monitor and inform management decisions at all levels | Planned for future |
| When possible, leverage data as a by-product of user actions and transactions for assessment | Planned for future |
| Use open data, open standards, open source, open innovation | |
| Adopt and expand existing open standards | Partially done |
| Open data and functionalities, and expose them in documented APIs | ✓ |
| Invest in software as a public good | ✓ |
| Develop software to be open source by default with the code made available in public repositories and supported through developer communities | Planned for future |
| Reuse and improve | |
| Use, modify, and extend existing tools, platforms, and frameworks when possible | ✓ |
| Develop in modular ways favoring approaches that are interoperable over those that are monolithic by design | ✓ |
| Address privacy and security | |
| Assess and mitigate risks to the security of users and their data | ✓ |
| Consider the context and needs for privacy of personally identifiable information when designing solutions and mitigate accordingly | ✓ |
| Ensure equity and fairness in co-creation, and protect the best interests of the end-users | ✓ |
| Be collaborative | |
| Engage diverse expertise across disciplines and industries at all stages | ✓ |
| Work across sector silos to create coordinated and more holistic approaches | In progress |
| Document work, results, processes, and best practices, and share them widely | ✓ |
| Publish materials under a creative commons license by default, with strong rationale if another licensing approach is taken | ✓ |
Abbreviation: API, application programming interface.