Center for Health Market Innovations (CHMI)

The Center for Health Market Innovations (CHMI) works with programs that focus on improving health (physical and financial) for the poor. They help evaluate and aggregate information on Health Market Innovations. Health Market Innovations are programs run by governments, NGOs, and other organizations and companies to improve health markets or how the health marketplace works to serve poorer populations.

The CHMI website was originally built by Development Seed, who created a fantastic technical base and theme, including graph-style reports and geo integration. We've been maintaining the site since Fall 2010, updating and adding to the site's functionality as required by the growth of the CHMI project.

We've made added many small improvements to the site, and some larger ones including:

Open data: downloadable program database

As a logged in user, when you browse the program profile database, you can download a complete or refined set of results from the site. This allows researchers and programs to access detailed data about all, specific, or single programs on the site, and also repeat these downloads whenever desired to accumulate data about changes over time.

Downloading the profile database search results is extremely user friendly - clicking on the Download icon brings up an overlayed box with instructions and a "Download database" button. When clicked, a .csv file of the results is downloaded to the user's computer.

Embeddable interactive search widgets

Along with the downloadable program database, CHMI also wanted a way to allow other partner and ally organizations' sites to use an embedded version of the program database search from CHMI.

We created a customizable widget embed feature that allows site users to export a widget from CHMI and embed it on their site. There are three types of widget that can be exported: a Mini List or Map Widget, and then the full Faceted Search Widget which also allows people to browse/refine the displayed results in the widget right on the external site. When a program is clicked on in the widgets, it brings the user back to the program profile on http://healthmarketinnovations.org/.

What makes it such a polished feature for external sites is that the size and colours in the widget itself can be altered right in the code export interface. You start with a default code snippet, and it's automatically updated as the size and colour options are changed. Then, all that needs to be done is to copy and paste the embed code into the external site.

The final widget, once embedded, is a fully interactive, targeted set of information for the organization's site, and also brings traffic back to the CHMI site, where people can begin to collaborate on maintaining and adding to the program database.

Here is the Faceted Search Widget in action:

And the Map Widget:

Program branding badges

The badge widget, though simpler, works similarly. Clicking on the badge image on a given program profile pops down a code snippet that, when added to an external site, embeds an linked image that shows that the program is profiled in the CHMI database and links back to CHMI's profile.