This community innovation has been accepted at the 2026 DHIS2 Annual Conference and will be in abstract track/lightning talk.
Extending DHIS2 Capture for CMO clinics
Community Medical Outreach (CMO) is a Samaritan’s Purse project that addresses the physical and spiritual needs of underserved people in U.S. communities. Partnering alongside local churches, they provide free dental, vision, and medical care through weekend pop-up clinics staffed by volunteer healthcare professionals and others. These clinics require fast patient flow while maintaining consistent patient identification, documentation, and follow-up. Paper remains part of the workflow for speed and practicality, but program teams still need structured data for monitoring, evaluation, and service improvement. We describe an implementation that uses DHIS2 for M&E while extending DHIS2 Capture to support clinic operations. Patient pre-registration is performed on tablets using the DHIS2 Android app, with records synchronized to the registration desk, where staff manage registration using DHIS2 from a web interface. The discharge team also uses tablets to check patients out, ensuring encounters are properly closed in DHIS2. Three extensions are integrated into DHIS2 Capture. First, an SMS workflow leverages DHIS2 SMS features with predefined templates and preview of translated template variants before sending. Messages notify patients about their status in the clinic queue and guide them through the flow. Second, label printing is integrated through a DYMO label printer embedded in Capture, supporting rapid labeling of paper forms and improving linkage to DHIS2 records. Third, registration plugins improve data quality at entry: ZIP code lookup auto-fills City/State, and date-of-birth handling standardizes formats and calculates age. This approach demonstrates practical DHIS2 Capture extensibility for high-volume episodic clinics, strengthening follow-up communication, reducing entry friction, and improving the quality of data used for routine reporting and dissemination.
Primary Author: Ramón Jiménez Montes
Keywords:
Capture; extensibility; SMS; label printing; plugins; Android; clinics; M&E; data quality
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