Geistflow: community cadre record capture for the National AIDS Council

Community cadres capture records in the field, often away from reliable connectivity, and those records need to reach the national programme in a consistent form. Record-keeping applications also change constantly: a new field, a different threshold, a form that asks one more question. Where each change means a software release, the application falls behind the programme it serves.

HISP Zimbabwe developed Geistflow, a platform for building record-keeping applications that are defined rather than programmed, and built the National AIDS Council of Zimbabwe’s community cadre record capture application on it.

The application is delivered as Geistflow modules: folders of definitions for schemas, screens, rules, workflows, access policies and integrations, loaded at runtime rather than compiled into code. The same definitions drive an Android handset offline and a browser online, and both reach the same verdict because both run the same engines over them.

Changes to the application are made as data, versioned, signed and reviewable, and installed without rebuilding anything.

The National AIDS Council of Zimbabwe currently uses the application as its community cadre record capture tool. Because the application is defined rather than programmed, the programme can adjust forms and rules without a new software release.